Something Biblical
by Troll Princess
Summary: The end of the world doesn't come with a bang or a whimper, just an eerie quiet followed by the slow rumble of something terrifying on the horizon.


Author: Troll Princess

Title: Something Biblical

Rating: R (For bad language, violence, graphic depictions of death, implied cannibalism and sex. Uh, hi.)

Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters, which you can tell because if I did, there'd be less angst and more boarding school hijinks.

Summary: The end of the world doesn't come with a bang or a whimper -- just an eerie quiet followed by the slow rumble of something terrifying on the horizon.

Warning: Well, you saw that thing in the parentheses after the rating. That "graphic descriptions of death" thing? Yeah, it's post-apocalyptic. It isn't going to be pretty.

Author's note: The bonus scenes on the DVD show Jubilee's powers in the movieverse as more electrical in nature, so since it works with the story, I'm sticking with it.

**Something Biblical**

Bobby woke up with the heavy tang of copper in his mouth, a dull ache over his entire body, and Storm's limp corpse pinning down his legs.

He could swear he heard someone sobbing off nearby, but all he could think about was the throbbing in his skull and the taste of blood coating his teeth. He spat out a mouthful of blood and grimaced when a few chips of teeth went with it into the snow. A quick swipe of his tongue around the inside of his mouth told him that they'd mostly come from the back. Wincing, he closed his eyes and just wished all of the pain would just go away.

Somewhere not far away, it smelled like someone was burning hot dogs.

He coughed at the stench, and the sobbing lessened. A weak voice called his name.

The brightness of the snow blinded him briefly as he reopened his eyes, and he took a deep breath before quickly rolling onto his back to keep the soreness from getting any worse. Storm's wide, unfocused eyes stared up at him, her scorched face resting with her unmarred cheek pressed against the snow near his knees. Her broken body lay sprawled across his legs, her limbs at crooked, unnatural angles.

Bobby cursed under his breath and scrambled backwards in the snow. The resulting wave of agony made him groan.

"Bobby! Oh, my God, are you okay?"

It took a second for Jubilee's cries to penetrate the cloud in his woozy mind, and Bobby blinked in confusion as he looked at his surroundings. Pieces of the school's jet sprinkled the snow-covered ground around him in ragged chunks, a piece of the jet's control panel here, an arm and a shoulder still clad in pieces of a black leather uniform over there. He spat out another mouthful of blood, narrowing his eyes at the terrifying flicker of flames not far from the shoreline.

_Shoreline?_ His brow furrowed at the thought. _What shoreline?_

The last thing he remembered with any clarity was the dam breaking. And fire ... he remembered fire, a blistering column of heat hitting the side of the plane before everything went dark. There were a few faded memories of Storm crying and Cyclops calling Jean's name and that blue guy, Kurt, praying in German, but nothing connected in his head. He squirmed further away from Storm's body as if doing so would keep him from going insane trying to remember.

Jubilee skidded to his side in the snow, clutching her left arm to her chest. Bruises encircled her wrist, and the angle of it didn't look right. "Bobby, you're in one piece, right?"

Her desperation cleared his head a little. "I think so. Why?"

"Come on," she said, trying not to sob again as she scrambled to her bare feet, the brown blanket draped over her shoulders slipping a little with the movement. She didn't grab for his arm, her only good hand keeping her damaged wrist to her chest, and Bobby forced himself to get up and trail after her. She wound her way through the wreckage of the jet, ignoring the devastation around them. She slipped on the snow, and Bobby's gaze immediately drifted down to her feet, which were turning paler with every passing second. If there was one thing he knew, it was the effects of cold on pretty much everything, especially the human body. If she didn't get some shoes on soon, it wouldn't be long before she'd start losing toes.

"Jubilee, you need shoes," he said, distractedly following after her as he assessed the damage. It wasn't bad yet, but it could get there soon enough.

She moaned out a ragged sob and snapped, "Oh, who cares about my stupid feet? I'll boost Storm's shoes if I have to. But Rogue --"

Suddenly, Bobby was wide awake, glaringly so. The glistening white snow and sharp, distinct scent of burning flesh combined to force a wave of nausea over him. "What's happened to Rogue?" he said. His teeth started to chatter from something other than the cold, and white-hot pain arced behind his eyes.

Jubilee was babbling something about her damaged wrist and not being able to move it when he spotted the familiar splash of dark brown hair from under a large piece of wreckage. She came to an abrupt stop in the snow, falling to her knees beside the wreckage with a strangled cry. She continued to whimper as Bobby sank to the ground beside her, the sensation making the dull roar in his head swim ominously from side to side.

The only parts of Rogue that were visible under the wreckage were her wild, tangled hair and her eyes, big and brown and staring out into nothing. Bobby's heart sank for the briefest of instances, fearing the worst. But then her head tilted towards him, rolling to the side so that she could look into his eyes, and Bobby nearly fell back into the snow gasping for air.

He'd never seen anyone look so ... stunned. It was the only word his stressed-out brain could come up with. He had a mental image of some horrible monster walking up to Marie's inner child and whacking it between the eyes with two-by-four, and had to cough to keep from laughing in nervous fear.

Choking back something sick and wild in the back of his mind, Bobby tried to think of ways to get Rogue out from under there, most of which involved either Jean or Kurt. His gaze darted to Jubilee. "Where's everybody else?"

Her eyes widened, then slowly turned to look at the large piece of the front part of the fuselage engulfed in flames not twenty feet away. From where they were sitting, Bobby could see an arm lying in plain view in the snow, poking out from the great mass of burning, twisted ruins. The arm was small and thin, and wasn't wearing a team uniform.

He couldn't tear his eyes away, not until Jubilee said in a small voice, "I think someone's under there with her."

Bobby frowned, then tugged his sleeve down over his balled fist and stuck it under the wreckage near Rogue's face. She stared up at him in eerie, unflinching calm as his covered fist encountered something that could only be someone else's head. Startled, he pulled his arm back out.

Blood soaked the end of his sleeve. Given the strange, healthy flush in Rogue's cheeks, he doubted it was hers.

"If you're going to get shoes off of Storm, go do it now," he heard himself say.

Jubilee frowned, unable to refrain from questioning even that simple of a request. "Why?"

"Just do it, okay?"

Jubilee flinched, but then she nodded, and a moment later, she was gone to wrestle Storm's boots from her body with her one good hand.

Rogue's eyes watched Bobby with frank curiosity as he squirmed across the ground to the other side of the wreckage. There was just a big enough gap between the wreckage, the ground, and Rogue on that side where he wouldn't have to worry about covering his skin, where he could just let his bare hand sink into the cold, inviting snow and let his powers do the rest. Moisture hung heavy and ready in the air from the dam breaking. This would be easy.

He reached in and jammed his fingers into the snow, soaking up the cold and the dampness and twisting it to do exactly what he wanted. Even if he couldn't see it, he could feel a sliver of ice growing from the ground near his fingertips, stretching and thickening with every passing second. It shot up so fast even he was surprised, and without warning, the wreckage flew up in the air, shoved upward by the wedge Bobby had created. It landed not far from Jubilee, making her yelp and scramble backwards in the snow.

Logan's body lie pressed against Marie's, the only bit of flesh touching hers being a small section of his temple resting against her neck.

But it was enough.

Bobby yanked her away from the body before he could think about injuries or broken bones, blinded with fear from all of the blood spilling across the ground. Slashes stood out across Logan's pale, bloodless skin, his expression frozen in a terrifying mask of horror. Bobby's gaze darted frantically to Marie, searching for visible bruises or injuries. Her clothes were soaked through with fresh blood.

She stared back at him with her odd unsettling silence. Her healthy unmarred skin was like a quiet condemnation.

Bobby and Jubilee exchanged a look as Rogue got to her feet in a single feline move, hauntingly familiar and absolutely frightening all at once. Her narrowed eyes took in her surroundings, her nostrils flaring as she took in the scents of the world around her. For the first time in years, Bobby felt a shiver of cold that actually bothered him.

"Marie?"

She turned towards him, eyes still narrowed in something vaguely resembling suspicion.

He tried to come up with something to say, and he finally blurted out, "Feel better?"

He instantly regretted it -- well, of _course_ she felt better ... Logan's prone corpse could attest to that -- but all Rogue did was frown in confusion and say, "I need to walk."

She wandered off in the direction of the woods, and Bobby was half-tempted to go after her. But she finally just stopped and stared at the spot down the valley where the dam used to be, now swallowed whole by the fury of Alkali Lake's release. Bobby couldn't take his eyes away from her, not even when Jubilee walked up to him with Storm's boots flopping loosely on her feet. Storm was a size bigger than Jubilee in shoes, but they'd do for now. She glared up at Bobby and said, "What, you couldn't use a piece of wreckage as a crowbar?"

"I was thinking on my feet," he said with a shrug.

Her scowl deepened. "Yeah, good luck with that."

Bobby's gaze fixed on Rogue's short sleeves, light top and bared neck, and he shucked off his sweater before stalking over to her side. "You can't wander around like that," he said, holding out the sweater for her to take. "It's too cold. Here, put this on."

She didn't look at him as she accepted the sweater. In a dreamy tone of voice, she said, "Won't you get cold?"

Glancing down at his white T-shirt, Bobby frowned. He almost told her that he could have walked back to New York naked in this weather and only had to worry about his pride, but she was so out of it, it wasn't worth the wasted breath.

Muffled footsteps on the snow startled Bobby and Jubilee, and they both turned towards the sound even as Rogue continued to stare off into the distance. A figure emerged from the other side of the plane, small and slight and dark, and it took a second for it to register with the both of them who it was.

"Artie?"

Jubilee's voice echoed in the eerie quiet around them. The boy didn't look that bad, aside from dozens of small cuts splashed across his skin and the fidgety look in his eyes. He spotted the three of them standing up and moving around and flinched as if he hadn't expected to find anyone else alive.

Bobby and Jubilee both hurried to his side, Bobby getting there first. "Are you okay?" he asked.

Artie's gaze drifted downward quickly, as if he weren't sure, then lifted to connect with Bobby's as he nodded. If it were anybody else, the boy's silence would have made Bobby worry about shock, but Artie's forked tongue gave him a lisp that made him self-conscious. Silent responses were standard fare for Artie.

Jubilee glanced over his shoulder. "Is anybody alive over --"

Artie shook his head frantically before Jubilee could finish. Bobby had a sneaking suspicion there was something on the other side of the plane that had scared Artie so badly, he didn't want to go over and confirm it. One look at Jubilee made him realize it was the popular opinion.

A thought darted through his mind, making him wonder why the four of them would survive with such minor injuries, but then it hit him that the damage had come to the front of the plane. The four of them had been closer to the back, and the crash must have simply dumped them onto the hillside, saving all of the serious damage for everyone else. As for Rogue, if she'd had any life-threatening injuries before, Logan's powers --

Bobby almost choked at the thought, his eyes focusing on Logan's prone body with an alarming absence of blood or life on the snowy ground. He suddenly noticed Artie's bare feet, just as pale as Jubilee's had been, and blurted out, "You need shoes, too."

He took a step towards Logan's body, but Artie grabbed onto his arm and whimpered loudly. The boy's frightened gaze darted towards Logan, and Bobby tensed as it occurred to him. "Would mine be better?"

Reluctantly, Artie nodded.

Ten minutes later, Jubilee was wearing Storm's shoes, Artie was wearing Bobby's, and Bobby's feet were stuffed into Logan's boots. The insides were soaked and squished with every step. Bobby preferred not to think about why.

All four of them went quiet for a long moment, everybody trying to think of a way to break the silence before Rogue finally said, "We can't stay here," and started walking towards the woods.

Bobby shot to his feet from the piece of wreckage he'd been sitting on. "Hey, where do you think you're going?"

She paused for an instant, but didn't turn around. "Away," she said, then continued onward.

Artie tilted his head thoughtfully then trailed after her like a loyal puppy, and after a long, hard look at their surroundings, Bobby followed in their wake. Only Jubilee was left behind to blurt out indignantly, "But what about --"

She took a step forward, and her booted foot connected with Logan's corpse. Blood welled up from the snow under her feet, and she flinched. "Hey, wait for me!" she yelped, and chased after them, wincing as every step jostled her injured arm.

* * *

A mile away, as they walked down an unpaved road covered in an inch of fresh snow, Jubilee asked in a quiet voice if anybody else could still smell the hot dogs.

Nobody answered her. But all of them walked twice as fast as they had before she'd said anything.

The first sign of life they saw after leaving the crash site came in the form of a set of vehicle tracks in the snow, new but dusted with a light smattering of flakes. Whoever it was who'd driven past hadn't done so very long ago, and they all exchanged a hopeful glance. Well, at least that meant there might be people close by, they all thought.

Of course, that was before they saw the pickup truck.

The truck keeled over at a twenty-degree tilt on the side of the road, its passenger side wheels in the ditch as if the driver had tried to park it without knowing there was a drop on the side of the road. The driver's side door hung open ominously, like a shadowy cave concealing a hideous beast. Everybody else focused on the truck itself, but Rogue's eyes were drawn to a set of tracks in the snow leading away from the truck. A huge smudge of unsettled snow stained the purity of the newly fallen layer of white beneath the open door, and long, dragging steps could be seen under the fresh flakes, like an injured person stumbling towards help.

The footsteps led across the road and into the woods, and Rogue narrowed her eyes to see closer, taking in the scents of the world around her. The others, however, were more preoccupied by Jubilee's sudden, excited squealing. "A truck," she said, with a sound halfway between a moan and squeak. She raced towards the truck as fast as her sore muscles would let her, and the boys trailed off behind her. "Oh, I think I'm in love."

Glancing towards Artie, Bobby cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, "Hello? Anybody out there? Hello?"

The echo of his own voice followed by that unsettling quiet was the only response he got.

"Something's wrong, Jubilee," he said as he approached the truck.

Jubilee wriggled up into the driver's seat with a pained expression, using the elbow of her injured arm to lever her body into the truck. Settling into the leather-and-canvas seats, she ran her fingers over the steering wheel with a comforted smile before looking over at Bobby and saying, "Yeah, right. You're telling me you don't want to take advantage of a pristine late-model pickup left alone with the door open --" She reached down and pulled a black leather keychain into view with a triumphant shake. "-- and the keys still in the ignition?"

He couldn't help but scowl as Artie leaned in beside him. If there was one person they both knew who could turn denial into an art form, it was Jubilee. "How about in the woods, with the door open and the keys in the ignition in a ditch?"

Jubilee's fingers gripped the wheel tight enough to turn her knuckles a stark, painful white. "Bobby, we're not going to find another truck, and I don't know about you, but I'm cold and scared and I just want to go home, all right?"

The last bit came out as a whimper, and Bobby couldn't help but agree with her. After all, who could fault them if they took the truck to get help? They were just kids, poor defenseless kids who'd just been in a horrible accident. With the exception of Rogue, they were all visibly injured, and she'd spent the time since the accident acting completely out of it. They needed help, and if some hunter in the middle of nowhere had been too lazy to take his car keys with him ... well, he was probably wearing flannel and goose down, anyway.

With a sigh, he asked, "Well, what about the driver? Don't you think he's around here somewhere, maybe in trouble or --"

Jubilee frowned. "Are you mental? Do you honestly think we skipped down the road and stumbled onto a crime scene or something? Our luck's bad, but it's not that bad."

He still had a bad feeling about this ... about everything that had happened since they'd left Alkali Lake, in all honesty. "Don't you think we'd get in trouble, just driving off with somebody's truck?"

"We just went through a plane crash," she said. "I think they'll let us off with a warning instead of a grand theft auto conviction."

"Well, can you drive it?"

Jubilee's brow furrowed as if Bobby had insulted her. "Can I drive it?" she said, sliding into the driver's seat. "Please. I'm the only one of us who can drive stick --" She darted a quick glance in Rogue's direction, but she was pretty sure Rogue wasn't mentally stable enough at this point to drive, even if she could dig through Logan's memories to figure it out. "-- and if you think a possibly broken wrist is going to stop me, you don't have half as much faith in my driving ability as you should."

Bobby and Artie exchanged a look. While many of the students at the school had their driver's licenses, and more than a few of the ones who didn't were runaways who'd picked up the ability to drive while on the streets, Jubilee's reputation as the best underage driver in the school preceded her. Then again, rumor had it that the reason she knew how to drive so well was because she of the naturally endowed jumper cables had boosted the occasional car in Los Angeles to make extra cash when she'd been homeless. The fact that she hadn't made much of an effort to disavow anyone of that notion had only turned it into a minor legend.

"I guess we have to take it," Bobby said in resignation, eliciting a triumphant grin from Jubilee. It suddenly occurred to him that one of them was missing, and he glanced around the road. "Where's Rogue?"

All three of them turned around to see Rogue standing on the other side of the road, staring out into the forest with her arms crossed. Bobby signaled for Artie to get in the truck, then walked over to Rogue's side and grabbed onto her shoulders in silent comfort. She continued to stare out into the thick growth of bare trees. He thought he saw footsteps in the snow, but didn't want to think about it. "Come on," Bobby said. "We're taking the truck."

"I smell blood."

He flinched, his hands almost slipping from her shoulders. Her brown eyes connected with his, something hard and sharp and familiar in their depths, and for a brief instance, Bobby barely recognized her. His own gaze darted towards the woods, narrowing as if he'd see an abrupt splash of crimson against the snow.

"Don't worry about it," she finally said, starting off towards the truck. "There's too much of it anyway."

Bobby watched her go and suddenly realized that he hadn't felt this cold since the fourth grade.

* * *

The ride towards civilization -- or what vaguely resembled it this far off in the middle of nowhere -- couldn't have been more painfully quiet. The silence in the truck cab only occasionally broke with the sound of a muffled whimper from the driver's seat with every jostle to Jubilee's damaged wrist. However, no one could pry their eyes away from the road as a few rundown houses came into view.

Jubilee shifted uncomfortably in the driver's seat, staring out the window with barely restrained glee. "I've never been so happy to see an armpit of a town in the middle of nowhere in my entire life," she said, a beaming smile crossing her face.

"You and me both," Bobby muttered. But his smile was more hesitant, less willing to emerge given the strange stillness of the homes they passed.

As they rounded a curve in the road, Bobby spotted a trailer home sitting not far from the road, a fat old man in a bathrobe sitting in a folding chair on the front porch. His head tilted forward at an odd angle, but from the road, he looked like he was asleep. A coffee cup lie at his feet, and Jubilee drove them past before Bobby could verify through the porch's railing that it had tipped over and spilled its contents all over the fat man's feet.

He shivered. Something about all of this wasn't right.

Jubilee made a left at a sign pointing towards Dog Creek, turning a corner past a tiny gas station with two rusty pumps out front. A pair of old pickups sat in front, one with its passenger side door wide open. No one could be seen anywhere nearby.

Artie squirmed and pressed closer to Bobby, looking up at the older boy with wide, terrified eyes. Bobby wished he could say something to calm the poor kid, but he felt it, too -- that ... absence. That was the only word he could come up with to fit what he was thinking, a lingering absence of something fundamental that gnawed at him

A little further on, they finally spotted the town through the trees, small hulking shadows of homes scattered around the next curve in the road through the forest. Jubilee narrowed her eyes at it, then glanced at the others with an uneasy smile. "Boy, this place is dead, isn't it?" she said.

She eased the truck around the sharp curve in the road, then almost immediately skidded to a halt. The four of them stared out past the windshield at the main drag of Dog Creek, not able to rip their gaze away from a devastating sight.

The plane crash had been the worst thing they'd ever seen for exactly thirty-three minutes.

"Holy shit," Rogue said, sounding eerily like Wolverine.

The main section of Dog Creek was a short stretch of road with a city hall/police station that might grow up to be a real building if it wished hard enough, a bar four times as large as the municipal building, a hunting supplies store attached to a tiny restaurant, and a handful of homes scattered across the surrounding area. All of the vehicles in the area were the same kinds of pickups or SUVs, with the exception of a dirty tractor trailer parked in front of the bar and one glaringly out-of-place clean yellow Hummer parked in the restaurant's lot.

Dead bodies lie everywhere.

On the sidewalk. In the middle of the road. One dangled from the open driver's side door of a Trailblazer, slumped over sideways with only a straining seatbelt keeping the dead man from falling to the ground. A red pickup had plowed into the facade of the municipal building, taking out a considerable chunk of old cinder blocks and grey paint and scattering it on the ground. The driver wasn't visible through the windshield, but it was a safe bet whoever it was was still in there. A woman lay prone on the sidewalk in the center of the road, a baby dressed in a snowsuit and wrapped in a blanket lying eerily still not far away.

All four of the students sat in the truck, their gazes fixed on the people lying dead around them as if watching them would make them all get up and scream, "April Fool's!" They wouldn't know for sure whether or not everyone was dead until they actually got out and checked, but none of them could bring themselves to move or breathe. Exiting the vehicle wasn't anybody's definition of a good idea.

Finally, after a long painful silence, Jubilee whispered, "Uh, can I take that last thing I said back?"

Artie made a face as if he were about to throw up and tried to scramble past Bobby to get out of the truck.

The door flew open a split second later, and Artie fell to the ground, whimpering as he crouched next to the truck and retched. Bobby got out and knelt behind the kid, sympathizing as he placed a hand on Artie's back. Between the plane crash and this, no wonder the poor kid's stomach had given up.

Jubilee and Rogue got out on the other side of the truck, walking around the front of it unable to rip their gazes away from the bodies lying nearby. Rogue took a few tentative steps toward the baby lying in the road, then froze and glanced back at Bobby.

Bobby rose to his feet, Artie still sobbing quietly at his side. Horror and realization slowly dawned in Rogue's eyes, and he could have sworn she knew exactly what had happened here.

"What the ..." Jubilee's voice trailed off as her gaze drifted down the road, taking in the sight of the dead with barely restrained fear. Helpless, she looked over at Rogue and Bobby as if they'd tell her what to do, as if being the oldest suddenly meant they knew everything. "What was it, a plague or something?"

Frowning, Bobby shook his head. It wasn't like he had a medical degree or anything, but he didn't think a plague would look like this, like dozens of people had simply fallen asleep in the middle of the day and decided never to wake up again. "They just dropped dead in the street," he said.

His eyes narrowed as he walked over to one of the bodies on the sidewalk and crouched beside it. The man looked like a tourist in this place, wearing the kind of expensive, brand-new cold-weather gear that would get rich out-of-towners laughed off the slopes of Blue Hills back home in Boston. Ten bucks said the Hummer was his, some never-used toy he'd bought just for this trip. A blond woman with neatly applied makeup lie not far away. Well, hello, trophy wife.

It took Bobby a few seconds to work up the courage, but he finally reached out and pressed his fingers against the pulse point in the man's neck. And waited. And waited. Then he did the same with the woman.

Oh, yeah. Both dead. Just like everybody else in town.

He heard one of the others whimper behind him. He was almost afraid to turn around and find out which one of them it was.

His voice croaked when he spoke. "Jubilee?"

"Yeah, Bobby?"

"What happened before the crash?"

There was dead silence as he got to his feet -- no pun intended -- and he turned towards the others hoping someone could give him a straight answer. Rogue had been on the plane with him, and Artie wasn't going to start talking even for this. Hell, especially for this. And that left Jubilee, who unfortunately was too busy shaking her head wildly in response.

"I think I remember."

All of them flinched at Rogue's voice as it broke the unnerving silence, that hint of the South that was always present gone in an instant. She sounded almost gruff and determined, and something heavy and cold settled inside Bobby as he looked over at her. "But you were on the plane with me," he said.

"Yes," she said, then steeled herself and said, "But Logan wasn't."

* * *

One Sunday afternoon, Marie had tried to explain to Bobby how the memories arranged themselves in her head. She'd failed miserably.

She'd been halfway through her first explanation before she'd figured out that what she'd been saying made it sound like she occasionally got possessed by multiple personalities. After backtracking on that particular description, she'd tried the train track comparison -- each new set of gained memories got its own track, and every once in a while, the train from the Magneto track or the Logan track switched over and drove along her rails for a while.

But that wasn't right, either. It was like ... well, it was like tributaries feeding into the Mississippi. They all led into the same place, their contents mingling and swirling together until everything got muddied.

That was what it felt like. Like she'd been there in the dam. Like she'd been there --

_"If he concentrated on one group of people -- let's say, mutants -- he could kill us all."_

Rogue flinched before she turned back to the blueberry muffin in front of her on the counter of the hunting store and picked off a piece, popping it into her mouth as she continued to describe everything Logan remembered about what had happened. Fighting Deathstrike. Finding Stryker's limp body strung up with chains on a piece of jagged concrete wall as they were escaping. Meeting up with the others and discovering the Professor hadn't made it out alive.

And most of all, the stricken looks on the faces of the other adults as they'd herded the children away and quietly filled him in on what Magneto had made the Professor do before he'd died.

Grimacing, she pushed away the remnants of the blueberry muffin, suddenly not hungry anymore. Jubilee just kept staring at her like she was some kind of alien, the girl's clear dark eyes focused on her through a sheen of silently shed tears. Sitting in the chair next to her on the other side of the counter, Bobby had spent the last five minutes bent forward with his head in his hands, breathing purposefully and steadily as if trying to keep himself from flipping out.

Artie, meanwhile, had made a run for it out the front door the second he'd realized what Rogue was getting at. She didn't blame him. If she hadn't been the one telling the story, she probably would have taken off to cry alone, too.

Jubilee tightened her grip on the blanket around her shoulders, her voice a mere shadow of how it usually sounded. "The Professor killed everybody?"

"All the humans, yeah."

Sniffling, Jubilee swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand and let out a ragged breath. "Are you sure?"

As sure as she could be, Rogue almost blurted out, but she couldn't bring herself to say something that sounded so uneven. Instead, she just said, "It's what Logan remembers."

"Logan wasn't even there when Magneto made the Professor do this," Bobby said, not bothering to lift his head. The Rogue from before the crash wouldn't have thought twice about running around the counter and carefully embracing him, but the Rogue currently standing behind the counter knew damn well that she spooked him right now way too much to be all that comforting.

"I was there," Jubilee said, then fidgeted when Bobby lifted his head to look at her and stammered, "B-but they were trying not to say anything. The teachers, I mean. They were just all upset and stuff. Cyclops looked like he wanted to keel over and die, he was so --" Her words cut off suddenly as she winced. "Oh, man, I can't believe I just said that."

"They could have been wrong," Bobby said. "He might not have killed all of the humans."

"I highly doubt that, kid," Rogue said. She immediately regretted it. It sounded so much like Logan talking, she couldn't decide whether to apologize or burst into tears.

Bobby shot to his feet and started walking towards the door, and Rogue called out, "Bobby, you okay?"

He stopped walking and turned to look back at her, the sadness in his eyes hard to ignore. "If you're right, my whole family is dead," he said quietly. "So, no, I'm not okay."

"Bobby," Rogue said, but he was already outside by the time she'd spoken, calling Artie's name. Meanwhile, Jubilee grabbed a pair of women's ski pants from a nearby table and kicked off Storm's boots. "You know," she said, squirming as she slipped her legs into the pants, "Artie's running off and hiding routine is probably the best idea he's ever had. Wish I'd had it first."

Rogue flashed her an annoyed frown before chasing after Bobby out into the street. He stood in the center of the road, giving the bodies nearby a wide berth before cupping his hands around his mouth and yelling, "Artie!"

Rogue tensed at the harsh sound in his voice and was half tempted to go back inside the hunting store to get away. But an instant later, a bright orange winter jacket was shoved into her arms, and Jubilee gave her a half-hearted smile as she shrugged into an identical coat, giving up on the left sleeve without even bothering to stick her injured wrist in it. Bobby continued to call for Artie, and Jubilee flashed him a dirty look. "Give him a few minutes, man. The poor kid gets spooked by _X-Files_ reruns. I'm pretty sure this is some lifelong trauma crap right here."

Bobby glanced over at her, his blue eyes hard and cold like solid ice. "We're all traumatized right now, wouldn't you say?"

Jubilee squirmed at Rogue's side as the older girl slipped on the winter coat. "Bobby one, Jubilee nothin'," Jubilee muttered.

Bobby turned back around and cupped his hands around his mouth. "Art--"

Something clattered about a block down the street behind them, and all three of them spun towards the noise. Artie stood not far away, some adult's heavy winter coat shrouding his thin frame and something dark and lumpy in his arms. He walked towards them with that look on his face as if he desperately wanted to tell them something, his foot connecting with a clear, plastic bottle that clattered across the pavement. His glance drifted quickly towards it by reflex, then darted back to the others as he scurried in their direction.

"Hey," Bobby said as Artie approached. "You okay?"

The kid nodded, clasping the bundle in his arms tight to his chest. The others stared at it with a growing sense of dread, something oddly familiar about the way he clutched it to his body. Jubilee made a choked sound in the back of her throat, and Bobby could have sworn he heard Rogue hiss a curse that she could have only learned from Logan.

As Artie walked up to Bobby, the older boy was tempted to take a step back, a futile attempt to run away from what he could see coming. "Artie," he said in a quiet voice, "what is that?"

Artie whimpered something and held out the bundle for Bobby to take.

In his arms was a tiny, whimpering baby.

* * *

The house Artie led them to was only around the corner from the main drag on a short side street, a small but neat home with blue siding and green trim on the windows. A rundown car was parked in the dirt driveway, and a husky stood behind the screen door, his paws against the frame as he barked loudly. The others gave Artie a worried look, but he bounded up the steps before they could protest and flung open the door, letting him be the first recipient of an overjoyed tail wagging and a frantic tongue bath to the face.

They crowded into the small living room with the dog bouncing around the place, tongue lolling out of its mouth as if it had been waiting for them to arrive for hours. It probably had, Rogue realized, frowning as she trailed her fingertips over the arm of the green plaid couch. It looked like a hand-me-down, much like the rest of the furniture in the place, and they all carried the scents of more people than she could count. Although, she thought with a grimace, it wasn't like she had much chance of separating the scents with the growing stench of death smothering all of the rest of them.

Walking into the living room behind the others, Jubilee winced as the husky tried to leap up and press its paws to her shoulder. "Cute dog," Jubilee said weakly, choking at the pungent odor wafting through the house as she used her good hand to hold off the husky.

She couldn't help the coughing. The air smelled faintly thick and sweet with a hint of the decay to come.

The baby squirmed in Bobby's arms, making a whine that made him wonder when the kid had last been fed. He adjusted his grasp on the baby, trying to remember how to hold one from back when his cousins had been born, then glanced around on the floor looking for the kid's parents.

It didn't take long to find one of them.

"Aw, man," Jubilee said, coughing again at the sight of the man sprawled on the kitchen floor. His eyes were closed and his head lay tilted to one side, his limbs stretched out in awkward angles from his body. His sweatshirt and jeans had grown dark and stained with the bottle of soda he'd knocked over when he'd fallen, the floor sticky and brown in a large circle around him. A cordless phone rested not far from his hand, dropped when he'd sunk to the floor.

Rogue's eyes narrowed as she stared at the phone, then glanced over at the baby. "You think he was calling the pediatrician?" she asked.

Jubilee sniffled. "Why would he do that?"

"Probably because the baby wouldn't stop crying."

They all looked over at the baby, now whimpering fitfully in Bobby's arms. The kid who shouldn't be alive right now.

Unless he was a mutant.

"It makes sense, doesn't it?" Rogue leaned against the nearest wall and crossed her arms, her brow furrowing in annoyance. Somewhere between her stance and the expression on her face, she looks so much like Logan that Bobby has to tighten his grasp on the baby to keep from flinching. "Kid starts wailing his head off, parents get all worried and call the doctor, kid stops crying, Dad goes to put the phone back only to drop dead on the kitchen floor."

It made sense, Bobby thought, but it didn't stop it from being morbid and weird and terrifying.

With her good hand, Jubilee grabbed the kitchen tablecloth and draped it over the body with a grimace, then glanced at the others and said quietly, "So if this is Dad, where's Mom?"

Artie cleared his throat, then flashed the others a meaningful look and started towards the staircase.

The husky trailed after the four of them as they headed upstairs, tail wagging happily as if they really were brave superheroes charging in to save its human pack mates. Framed photos hung on the walls of the stairwell, candid shots of strangers and posed Sears portraits that none of them could bear to look at. Everyone just stared straight ahead at the back of the person in front of them, too afraid of what they might see if they looked the wrong way.

Artie tugged Rogue towards an open baby blue door right next to the stairs, and the others had no choice but to follow. The nursery itself was bright and cheery, with Winnie the Pooh characters on the wall and teddy bears piled up in the window seat. But the room felt vacant and cold, stale and devoid of life like a sealed-off cavern.

There was a body lying in the center of the nursery.

Phrase it like that, and it almost made them all want to run away.

The woman's corpse lay sprawled in front of the crib, the only things marring her peaceful expression being the large cut on her forehead and the stain of blood spread along the side of her face. An ominous smear of blood stood out in a dark stretch against the pale yellow paint on the corner of the nightstand next to the changing table. In their minds, they could see her tentatively relax as the baby stopped screaming in pain, only to keel over in agony and hit her head against the nightstand. She was probably dead before she even hit the floor.

Well, hopefully.

All of them wished somebody would throw up. But none of them had the mental energy to carry through anymore.

A dirty diaper lay crumpled and discarded off to the side on the changing table, and a disdainful look from Artie told everybody he was the one who left it there. The room reeked of blood and baby vomit and other things none of them wanted to think of just then.

Bobby turned to Artie. "You found him here?"

Artie nodded, patting the changing table for good measure.

Staring down at the body on the floor, Rogue tensed and grabbed Bobby's arm. "He has to have been here for hours," she said, her hand slipping up to latch onto the baby's tiny hand. "Alone with ..."

They all looked down at the body on the floor, then looked away before they could regret it.

"If we hadn't found him, he would have starved like this," Bobby said. "Or frozen, or --"

The husky reached out and buried his cold nose in Jubilee's palm, and she stroked his head before blurting out, "Or the dog would have eaten him." The others glared at her, and she frowned. "What? Everybody was thinking it, right?"

Rogue scowled at her and Artie toyed with the quilt draped across the edge of the changing table, but both of them looked a little guilty when they did.

The four of them kept looking around the room, then at the baby, then at one another. Rogue finally sighed and reached out to smooth her hand over the baby's soft forehead. He cooed at the sensation and lifted his tiny arms as if to grab for her touch. "I'll go see if there's a birth certificate or a passport or something lying around for the kid," she said, then ducked out the bedroom door.

Jubilee watched her go, then gave Bobby a curious look. "He's going to need, like, bottles and diapers and stuff, right?"

Bobby nodded absently, but she was gone before she could get an answer. Artie glanced thoughtfully around the room, then focused on a row of photos lining the walls. Mom and Dad bringing their new baby home from the hospital, Mom giving the baby a bath, Dad introducing the baby to the family's husky for a first, slobbery kiss. He gave Bobby a meaningful look, then cocked his head towards the photos before walking over to remove them from their frames.

If they were going to bring the kid with them, the least they could do was take picture of his parents for him to remember them by.

The baby made a grunting sound, and Bobby grinned down at him reluctantly before suddenly realizing they didn't even know the kid's name yet. His gaze darted around the room searching for a labeled pair of baby pajamas or an embroidered pillow or something, and finally settled on a framed birth announcement hanging on the wall next to the crib.

Only child of parents Jill and Mark Norris. Born four months ago at the local clinic, seven pounds and seven ounces. Full name, Charles Daniel Norris.

Oh, they had to be joking.

"Charlie, huh?" Bobby looked down at the baby in his arms with a sympathetic frown. "That is some seriously screwed-up karma, kiddo."

The baby just yawned and wriggled closer in Bobby's arms.

* * *

For the next two hours, the only signs of human life in the town of Dog Creek bustled in the tiny house at the end of Maple Lane. Showers were taken, the refrigerator raided, and the closets divested of the cleanest, best-fitting clothes they could dig up. Ever the scavenger, Artie even managed to dig up a wrist brace for Jubilee's injured arm in the attic. To say she was grateful did not even begin to describe the happy squeals that came from the kitchen when he gave it to her, and one wrapped wrist and a few pain pills later, her arm was as close to good as new as it was going to get.

And if every so often a door would close somewhere in the house and someone would cry by themselves, nobody else could bring themselves to mention it.

When they'd all finally showered and eaten, after the four of them had fished all of the decent food out of the cabinets and made themselves dinner while patently ignoring the five-hundred-pound gorilla that was the two-hundred-pound dead man on the floor, they all dumped their dishes into the sink without bothering to wash them and sat around staring at one another, trying to figure out what came next. "So," Jubilee said, absently picking at her cuticles, "what do we do now again?"

Bobby shrugged. "We go home," he said.

"Well, I know that," Jubilee said, making a face at him.

Rogue glanced over at Bobby, feeding the baby from a pink plastic bottle without seeming the least bit uneasy about it. She almost fed him as if she'd taken care of a baby before, and Bobby briefly wondered if that was something she'd done before or whether it was a talent gruff and angry Logan had picked up along the way. "Shouldn't we try to get in touch with the others and let them know what happened?"

"Sure, we'll just call them on their cell phones," Jubilee said with her usual side of sarcasm. "I'm sure they all grabbed them before they ran away from the G.I. Joe Midnight Panty Raid Brigade, right? I mean, I know I did." She mimed flipping open a cell phone with one hand and held it up to her ear. "Verizon. Don't get kidnapped without us!"

Rogue, Bobby, and Artie all glared at her as if doing so would shrivel her vocal cords. Even the baby managed a discontented grunt.

"I think we should just try the mansion anyway," Bobby said. He reached over to grab the cordless phone from its base.

"The soldiers will still be there," Jubilee said, her voice cracking a little. Artie looked just as flustered, making a sound that sounded suspiciously like a whimper.

Rogue's brow furrowed, and she shifted the baby in her arms. "In great big rotting heaps, Jubilee," she said. If both Jubilee and Artie appeared not only to be satisfied by that remark, but to get a happy little thrill out of the mental image, Rogue chose to ignore it. Instead, she gave the phone a pointed look before letting her gaze lock with Bobby's and shrugging as best she could with the baby in her arms. "Can't hurt, can it?"

He nodded reluctantly, then started dialing. It only took three numbers before he stopped and confusion flickered in his blue eyes as he glanced around the kitchen table at the others. "Oh, man. I just remembered we're in Canada."

Jubilee couldn't help but smile. "You just remembered now?"

"I was a little busy being surrounded by dead people," he blurted out.

The kitchen went abruptly silent, and everybody tried desperately not to look at the tablecloth on the floor.

Bobby looked down at the phone receiver, a dead weight in his hand. "Don't you have to dial a code or something to call out of the country?"

All eyes turned to Rogue, who paused in burping the baby to frown. "Don't look at me," she said almost indignantly, before her voice dropped in volume. "It's not like I phoned home from the middle of nowhere in Canada after I ran away."

Bobby was half-tempted to ask whether or not Logan remembered how to call out of the country, but since Rogue wasn't volunteering any explanations, he figured defining the possible outcomes of an apocalyptic future rated higher on the priority meter of siphoned memories than making international phone calls did. Tugging out the drawer nearest the cordless base and finding only a stack of over mitts, Bobby asked, "Do you guys see a phone book?"

"No," Rogue said after a quick glance around the kitchen. Bobby's gaze darted to Jubilee, then Artie, both of whom shook their heads. Reluctantly, he hung up the phone, not willing to let it go. His brain didn't seem to want to give it up, as if whatever stupid code you had to put in to call from Canada to New York would suddenly pop into his head. Not to mention that he wasn't even sure if anybody would have gone back to the mansion already. Maybe he could just try random --

Something in the living room caught his eye, and Bobby dropped the phone onto the kitchen table without a second thought, a determined grin on his face. "I've got a better idea," he said as an afterthought, walking into the living room and sitting down at the cheap particle-board computer desk propped up against the far wall.

The others watched with curious expressions as he booted up the computer and brought up his online email account with a triumphant smile. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Emailing Pete," Bobby said, bringing up the right screen on the computer. "He probably would have been in charge of the others, right?" Everybody else made choked, mocking sounds, and he said, "You got any better ideas?"

Jubilee let out a derisive little laugh and leaned her hip against the corner of the desk. "Oh, please. Like Pete's going to check his email after the apocalypse. He didn't even check his email when John forwarded those pictures of Miss Grey sunbathing in a bikini to you guys." She shook her head, then leaned over and said, "Email Kitty. She'd check her inbox during a nuclear attack."

"Why don't you just email everybody?"

Jubilee gave Rogue a skeptical look. "Who else is even going to go near their email right now?"

After a long pause, Rogue frowned and said, "Okay, point taken."

Meanwhile, Bobby stared at the screen, more than a little shocked that he'd even been able to bring up the Internet at all. It'd only been a few hours since whatever had happened in the dam, but Bobby couldn't help it if he'd simply expected everything to shut down the same way the human race had. "What am I even supposed to write?"

"I don't know," Jubilee said. "How do you tell someone every non-mutant on the planet is dead? Singing telegram?"

"I think they're probably noticed something's gone wrong by now."

She shrugged and said, "You could always be blunt. 'Jet in pieces, just like teachers.'"

Artie stopped going through the kitchen cabinets long enough to grimace, and Bobby looked up at her with a frown. "That's disgusting."

Jubilee crossed her arms and said, "You're composing an email four hours after a fatal plane crash and ten feet from a corpse. Gallows humor is all we've got left right now."

He squirmed at that, but didn't say anything. Instead, he focused on the screen for a long moment, then started typing up what he could bring himself to mention to Kitty in an email, of all things. There'd been an accident. There were only a few of them left alive. There was something they all really needed to talk about with her, and they'd do it just as soon as those left behind got back home.

Anything else was just too much to say.

He sent off the email before he could have second thoughts, not letting himself worry about what Kitty would think if she even did bother to go anywhere near a computer in the next few days. Hell, what was the point? She'd probably be just like the rest of them, too busy trying to figure out what the hell had happened to every human on the planet that --

He was just about to get up when he was stopped by a familiar sound.

The ding of an IM window opening.

The box popped up on the screen labeled with the username "kitkat15", the words _Bobby, you still there?_ in bold black letters against the white. All four of them froze and stared at the computer monitor with identical confused frowns.

"Doesn't she have I anything /I better to do during the apocalypse?" Rogue asked.

"Apparently not," Bobby said.

* * *

_You're making that up._

"I'm not making it up," Bobby muttered, glaring at the computer screen as if it were Kitty sitting right in front of him. It wasn't like he'd given her every little detail he knew, but to be honest, he hadn't had to. For the past two days since the attack on the school, Kitty and a few of the other students who'd managed to run off had been staying at a neighbor's house in Salem Center waiting for the authorities to come around and question them about the attack.

They'd still been waiting when they'd all dropped to the ground in agony.

Their hostess, a nice old lady who'd been hurrying to call 911 when they'd fallen, had collapsed right after they'd all started to feel better. She'd only taken a minute to die, the kids in her care crouching around her terrified that they'd done something wrong.

But a trip into town had quickly made it obvious it wasn't any of their faults. Every human in town had dropped dead, and every mutant in the area came out of the woodwork, most of them wondering if it'd been their doing.

They'd all gone back to the mansion within the hour, the only place in the county big enough and perfectly equipped to house a large crowd of mutants. While the others had taken over cleaning up the place and getting rid of the bodies of the few soldiers left behind, Kitty was busy manning the phones and the Internet just in case any of the students still missing tried to contact the school. So far, they'd been the only ones, but they were the ones everybody else had wanted to hear from.

Bobby got the impression what he'd told her hadn't gone over well. It was probably the reason she hadn't insisted he get on a phone, aside from the computer being her usual comfort zone. Not hearing his voice and talking instead to a username left behind a lingering hope for deniability.

_i'm not making itup, _he typed out. _first the damn broke, and thenthere was plane crash_

He was just about to type up another line when Kitty piped up with, _Either you take a second to proofread your responses or I'm shutting down the chat window._

Bobby couldn't help but roll his eyes. He could almost picture her crossing her arms and glaring at him across the continent. _Sorry_, he carefully typed out. _I'm a little stressed out._

_And you think I'm not?_

Okay, point.

Bobby flinched as the dog, which had been sleeping at his feet for most of his conversation with Kitty, leapt to his feet and raced to the closed front door to bark at it. A second later, Artie came in, smiling as he patted the dog's furry head. As soon as the dog settled down, Artie glanced in Bobby's direction and waved him towards the door.

Curious, Bobby typed up a quick BRB to Kitty, then walked over to see what Artie was trying to show him. The others had vanished pretty quickly as soon as Bobby had started explaining the situation to Kitty, Rogue carrying the baby upstairs to pack his things and Jubilee and Artie vanishing into town. God only knows what they'd brought back.

What they'd brought back, it turned out, was the Humvee

Parking it pretty much on the front lawn, Jubilee leaned out of the driver's side window and held down the horn, making everybody jump. It was too much noise at once for kids who spent the last few hours living in that strange, unnerving silence. "What do you think?" she said, patting the side as she beamed with a proud smile.

Bobby put his hands on his waist and grinned. "I think we're going to spend the next few days listening to you babble incoherently about getting to drive a Humvee."

Jubilee rolled her eyes and shut off the ignition, getting out of the car with an excited hop. "Oh, come on," she said as she jogged up to them. "It's a _Hummer_. Before today, the only way I would have ever gotten to drive a Humvee is if I'd joined the Army or become a rap star. And I didn't even have to break the window to get in. All I had to do was dig through the owner's pockets."

"Great," he said sarcastically, "and it only took everybody dying for you to get it."

Jubilee's face fell, and Bobby regretted what he'd said almost immediately. Her dark brown eyes went glassy with carefully unshed tears, and she punched him in the arm with her good hand before stalking into the house.

Bobby winced and grabbed at the spot she'd hit, then glanced down at Artie, who gave him a dirty look and trailed after Jubilee.

Wonderful. The world ended and he was still sticking his foot in his mouth.

* * *

The next morning, after they'd lain the bodies of the baby's parents on their bed and covered them in a flowered comforter, the four of them finished packing up the Humvee with anything in the house they thought they might need and anything in town they thought they might want. By nine-thirty, they were ready to leave.

Ready to go home, or the closest thing any of them had to it anymore.

Bobby stood in the living room alone after dashing off a final quick email to Kitty to tell her they were leaving, then printing off the directions from Mapquest to get them home. He folded the printed pages in half, then gave the computer a wistful look before shutting it down. He had no idea how long the electricity would stay on or how long it'd take the Internet to become a distant memory, but he wasn't really up to thinking about it anymore than he was up to calling the school. He could, now that he knew through Kitty that all he really had to do was dial a one before the number, but none of them were really up to the task of actually sitting down and talking to one another about the whole thing over the phone. That would take a hell of a lot more emotional fortitude than any of them was up for at the moment. Hell, they'd had a difficult enough time trying to figure out whether or not to go back to the crash site and bury the others, a conversation the night before that had ended with a reluctant decision not to out of all them.

When a honk sounded from the front lawn, Bobby grabbed the gym bag of clothes he'd rummaged out of Mr. Norris's closet and headed towards the door. As he walked out of the house, he spotted Jubilee leaning on the horn and flashing him a dirty look from the driver's seat, something that made Rogue look over her shoulder from where she was leaning against the front of the truck and give Jubilee a Logan-esque glare that would have made any sane person wet themselves. The baby lay snuggled in a blanket in her arms, and Artie stood beside her, making faces at the kid and occasionally wiggling his forked tongue at it.

Rogue smiled, tucking the blanket more tightly around the baby, and said, "You coming any time this year?"

That hint of the South that always tinged her speaking voice was back again, and Bobby couldn't resist a grin. If that was a small sign that Logan's personality traits had stepped back for the moment, he'd take it. "Yeah, I'm ready. You guys all set?"

Artie nodded enthusiastically and held up the bag full of baby things at his side.

A thought occurred to Bobby, and he glanced back at the car. "Did anybody bother to check out the car?"

Rogue shook her head. "No, we've been too busy packing and getting ready. Why?"

"You forgot something," he said with a wry smile, then grabbed a can of baby formula that was sticking out of the top of the bag at Artie's side. Rogue narrowed her eyes in his direction as he walked over to the car. "Bobby?"

"Give me a second," he said, then took the can of baby formula in his hands and smashed the driver's side window.

The others winced at the sound, the baby squirming and letting out a mewl, but Bobby ignored it as he reached in and undid the lock on the door. Opening it, he made sure the inside of the door was clear of glass before flipping the power locks on the entire car. He slammed the door shut again, then strolled around to the back passenger side door.

A few minutes later, he walked towards the others with the infant seat in his hands.

Rogue took one look at it and flushed bright red, then muttered, "You could have just gone inside and gotten the keys, you know."

"That wouldn't have been half as satisfying," he said, giving her a uneasy smile before walking over and opening the door to the back seat.

Unable to resist, Rogue returned the smile. "Can't argue that one."

Ten minutes later, after they'd wrangled the car seat into the back seat of the Humvee and gotten the dog into the back, the four of them got inside, strapped on their seat belts and glanced around at one another expectantly. At any other time, the four of them together in a car would have meant a weekend 7-11 run or an after school trip to the mall. Jubilee would have been complaining about the traffic and Rogue would have been playing with the radio and Bobby would have been cracking jokes about how badly he was going to beat Artie on "House of the Dead" in the mall arcade.

Instead, they were about to drive cross-crountry, alone, with corpses around every corner and their friends and teachers lying dead on a hillside in the woods.

"So," Bobby said from the front passenger's seat, breaking the silence, "are we ready?"

Rogue nodded. "Let's go home," she said, her voice breaking on the last word.

Turning the ignition over, Jubilee gave the others a hopeful smile, then put the Humvee in reverse and pulled out of the Norrises' front lawn.

* * *

"I spy with my little eye --"

"If you try to start another road trip game, I'm going to freeze your mouth shut."

Jubilee glared over at Bobby from the driver's seat before turning her gaze back onto the road ahead of them to watch out for obstacles. "I can't help it," she complained. "I'm bored out of my skull here, all right? We've been on the road a whole day as it is, Artie's not talking, and ever since we crossed the border into the states, the two of you have been all mopey and quiet."

Bobby leaned against the passenger's side door and glanced back at Rogue, who'd settled the baby down on the blanket on the back seat to change his diaper. Charlie looked up at her with wide blue eyes and kicked his feet as she pulled off the used diaper, the baby cooing at her as she narrowed her eyes at the back of Jubilee's head. "Would you rather we burst into song?"

The grumbling tone of Rogue's voice just seemed to irritate Jubilee more, and she tightened her one-handed grip on the steering wheel as she muttered, "I'd rather you burst into something other than a long-term brood."

He hated to agree with her, but Bobby couldn't resist looking away when Rogue's gaze darted to his face as if searching for confirmation that she'd been constantly sullen since they'd left Dog Creek. Granted, they'd all had good reason to be depressed and silent, since driving on the highway had, up until an hour or so earlier, meant a slow, winding drive through the neverending quiet of the countryside. Trying to maneuver their way around stranded vehicles and bodies in the middle of the road was hard enough as it was, but at least on the back roads, there was less of a chance of coming in contact with either corpses or crashes.

Jubilee had finally stopped complaining about their itinerary the moment they're driven past a sign claiming that the upcoming four-lane highway was both almost finished and nearly deserted due to some last-minute road construction work. She couldn't pull over and drag the barrier out of the way of the entrance ramp fast enough.

In the back seat, Rogue reached for a diaper from Artie, who helpfully handed her one from the plastic bag at his feet, and slipped the business end of it under the baby's bottom before saying, "Tell you what. When you find a town with someone who'll actually come out of hiding, we'll talk."

Jubilee grimaced and squirmed in the driver's seat. "Oh, wonderful."

Rolling his eyes and leaning back to lay his head against the headrest, Bobby closed his eyes and tried desperately not to start another argument. The last few towns they'd allowed themselves to go anywhere near -- and only for food -- had appeared to be deserted, until Rogue had taken a whiff of the air and declared the scents of one or two perfectly healthy people coming from somewhere nearby.

They'd spent the previous night in a rundown motel in the middle of nowhere with a single car in the parking lot and a pair of bodies in the rental office. Unable to sleep, the scent of an unknown living someone in the air, Rogue had stayed up all night and buried the bodies of the dead people from the office. Considering their general agreement that burying the dead wasn't worth the time it would take with the number of them so high and all, Rogue's decision to spend the night digging a hole on the far side of the hotel had looked to Bobby to be a thinly veiled excuse to stay up until morning with a heavy weapon in her hands.

He wasn't sure how he felt about the bits of her that had come from Logan most of the time, but he couldn't say he wasn't grateful for the need to wave a sharp object at a threat.

Sighing heavily on the other side of the car, Jubilee drove the Hummer around the curve in the road, then hissed out a curse and slammed on the brakes.

Bobby's eyes flew open at the sudden stop, and he grabbed onto the dashboard tightly as he let loose with a shuddering breath.

The Hummer came to a screeching halt, causing Rogue to spill the baby powder in her hand to the floor. She sighed and reached down to pick up the container of baby powder as she said, "Damn it, Jubilee, you think you can drive a little more like a maniac? You're lucky Charlie didn't roll off the seat onto the --"

Bobby's hand reached back from the front seat, latched onto the top of her head, and turned her to face what everybody else was already looking at in stunned silence.

As soon as she saw what the others couldn't rip their gazes away from, Rogue choked back a sob. "Oh, my God," she whispered.

They'd seen the smoking hull of a broken plane only the day before, but that didn't mean they'd become used to the sight. The pieces of the jetliner stretching across the road weren't large, the remnants of a crash at high speed into the ground that almost looked as if someone had tried to level it off before it had formed a massive crater and had failed.

The wreckage sprawled across the highway like a burn scar scorched across the land, the only thing left to identify what it used to be the hollow shell of a cockpit. Jammed in between a pair of burnt steel skeletons that had once been cars, the cockpit rested with its nose pointed towards the same sky it had fallen from. Everything else lay scattered in small, broken pieces across the road, shards of metal and cracked suitcases and body parts strewn on the pavement like morbid confetti.

The biggest piece of wreckage left behind other than the cockpit was a sole airplane seat sitting cockeyed near the divider, pristine and perfect with a small, neatly severed section of the floor still attached to it. Not far away lay a corpse covered in a blanket, its blackened arm uncovered and reaching out as if to grab for whomever had managed to escape certain death in that unmarred, untouched airplane seat.

Bobby was the first one out of the Hummer, practically falling out of the thing in his haste to get a better look at the crash. The others weren't far behind, the baby whimpering from the tension in the air and the sudden sharp stench of burnt flesh in the air.

"It's not going to be the last one we see, you know."

All eyes turned away from the crash to look at Rogue, who stared with an eerie calm at the twisted bits of metal and remains of the dead. "Everything that goes up has to come down eventually."

Bobby took a deep breath and instantly regretted it, the strong odor leaving behind a disgusting taste in his mouth that made him wince. "If that's your idea of philosophizing, I'll pass," he said.

Standing beside him, Artie nodded in agreement.

Rogue ignored them both, directing her gaze to a stunned Jubilee. "Can you drive through it?"

Jubilee flinched and glared at Rogue, but Bobby didn't blame her for asking. The last exit had been three miles back, and it would be a hell of a lot easier to drive around the wreckage and bodies than it would be to turn around and try to navigate their way through more back roads. "We'll have to go back the other way if you can't," Bobby said, unable to restrain a grimace as he said it.

The look on Jubilee's face told him she was just as conflicted about the whole thing as he was, and she toyed at the strap on her wrist brace with a frown as she stared at the cockpit, an odd look on her face. "Yeah, sure," she said quietly. "Just ... just give me a second."

Nodding, Bobby turned around and urged Artie to get into the back seat, giving Rogue a worried look as he did so.

She didn't even bother to look at him, too busy wrapping the baby back up in his blanket and putting him in his car seat.

* * *

The next hour or so was spent in absolute silence, with Jubilee staring out the windshield with a strained look on her face, Bobby freezing drinks and passing them to the others from the cooler at his feet, Rogue keeping her attention focused on the baby, and Artie glancing around at the other three as if they'd all gone insane.

Not exactly ideal traveling conditions, by any means.

Jubilee rested her elbow of her bad arm through the open window and leaned her forehead against the wrist brace, trying not to press too hard against her hand and send another dull wave of pain up her arm. The injury had toned down somewhat in the pain department overnight, and she was pretty sure it wasn't broken, but it was still sore enough to make her wince every time she moved it the wrong way.

Then again, she thought with a grimace, maybe that was exactly what she needed to take her mind off the plane lying in pieces across the highway miles behind them. Thinking about that crash led her to thoughts of the last plane crash she'd seen, that time from a much more horrific vantage point.

Somehow, she doubted what she really needed while driving was a good, old-fashioned nightmare.

A sign off to the side of the highway caught her eye, and she perked up suddenly and swerved the Hummer towards the nearest exit, not paying attention to the ensuing protests and the wooden carpenter's horse blocking the end of the ramp that quickly became little more than a pile of toothpicks.

Bobby scowled at Jubilee, wiping a splatter of soda from his T-shirt with his hand. "What is your problem? Is slamming on the brakes and jerky steering a spastic condition with you now?"

"I want to go to the mall," she said.

Everybody else in the Hummer looked at her like she'd suddenly declared she was pregnant with a litter of kittens.

"You've got to be kidding me," Bobby said.

"It's not a bad idea."

Artie and Bobby's annoyed gazes darted to Rogue, who shrugged as she glanced at the sleeping baby in the seat next to her. "Kid needs diapers and clothes. Maybe a stuffed monkey or some stupid thing."

"And we have to call home eventually, you know, like it or not," Jubilee said. "Plus, we all need new stuff. New clothes, new shoes, and I don't know about you, but I desperately need some new music in this truck."

Bobby cocked an eyebrow. "More than breathing?"

Jubilee plucked a plastic case from the space in between their two seats and waved it towards Bobby. "With a Springsteen CD our only soundtrack? Yes, more than breathing, and probably more than food and clothes, too." She glanced around the Hummer to take in everybody else's skeptical expressions and frowned. "Oh, come on, you guys. If we don't do something fun sometime soon so that we can all de-stress, my entire central nervous system is going to explode and take the rest of you with it. And call me an airhead, but tell me it wouldn't be fun to skip the window shopping and pretend you're spree shopping with the Professor's platinum cards."

"Any mall we go to is going to be filled with dead bodies," Bobby pointed out.

"Yes, but none of them will ask us for payment and most of them won't even be in lines."

Rogue barely restrained a Logan-esque grunt as she said, "Or if they are, they'll just be piled on top of one another."

Jubilee couldn't resist a smile at that, and the Hummer suddenly sped up as if she couldn't wait to get there, gracefully maneuvering the car around a pair of corpses in the road and an ambulance that had plowed into a telephone pole. Bobby's grip on the door tightened as the Hummer swerved from side to side, flashing Jubilee a dark look. "This is such a bad idea," he said.

Frowning, Jubilee said, "What is your problem, Bobby? Seriously?"

"Don't you remember _Dawn of the Dead_?"

Jubilee glanced over at him with a heavy dose of skepticism, not even looking at the road as she drove around a little boy lying in the middle of the road with a bicycle leaning on top of his body. "You think we're going to find zombies at a mall?"

"Considering the past couple of days?"

Jubilee's head cocked to the side as she frowned. "Okay, point."

Bobby glanced around at the others, suddenly wondering when he'd become the world's biggest pessimist. The fact that there was a reason that phrasing might actually be literal at this point was something he tried not to think about. Toying with the plastic ring around the top of his soda bottle, Bobby said, "Do you honestly think other mutants won't have had the same idea?"

"Is that such a bad thing?" Jubilee said with a sigh.

"It is if they're armed," Rogue said, her gloved hand drifting over subconsciously to rest on the baby's tiny hand. "And ready to defend themselves."

Jubilee sighed as she rested her wrist brace on the steering wheel and dragged the fingers of her good hand through her hair, the long black strands falling away from her tired eyes. "So, wait. Now we don't want to find anybody."

"No, we just don't want to run into a mutant without an active power who's pointing a gun at our heads," Bobby said. "I don't know about you, but since we're the only two who could do anything in that situation, I'd kind of like to keep the chances of it happening to a minimum."

He noticed her glance in the rearview mirror quickly then back at him, as if she wanted to point out that somewhere inside Rogue's brain was a vast encyclopedic knowledge of how to kick someone's ass or die trying. But instead she scowled and slipped on a pair of cheap sunglasses she'd liberated from a 7-11 and turned onto the road leading to the mall. "All right, tell you what, Bobby. When the armed psychos show up to blow us all up with a bazooka, your argument can stand. But can I please be wearing new underwear and my own bra when that happens?"

Bobby let out a ragged breath and shook his head. Well, it'd been worth a try.

* * *

The mall that Jubilee drove them to resembled any large shopping center during a highly popular and fairly frantic mall-wide sale that had suddenly been hit with some sort of giant sleep ray. The sidewalk outside the mall was littered with bodies, some of them lying where they'd fallen, some of them piled together in a way that suggested that someone -- a very scared, very confused someone -- had tried to pull them together into groups as if to either clear space, leave them to their eternal rest with others around, or just to keep from going nuts. The packed parking lot had very few empty spaces left, and more than a few of the cars that had either not yet parked or were about to leave had driven directly into the nearest solid object when the Professor's mind had distracted their drivers.

More than a few of the dead lay on the warm concrete of the parking lot exposed to and rotting under the late-day warmth of the sun, a sight the four teens were growing far too used to.

On the far side of the parking lot, a German shepherd with a worn collar around its neck gnawed on the arm of a dead woman. That, the kids tried not to notice, although they couldn't ignore the husky's whimper from the back as Artie stopped absently petting it.

Jubilee pulled up to the front entrance and parked the Hummer behind a convertible that had skidded to a stop with its front wheels resting on the sidewalk. The kids gave the car a cursory glance as they spilled out of the Hummer, the husky hopping to the ground behind them. The baby squirmed in Artie's arms at the rude intrusion into his nap, but Artie stuck his forked tongue out like a weird party favor, and Charlie cooed as he waved his hands up in the air and tried to grab at it.

"Okay," Jubilee said as she started scribbling a list down on a piece of paper, "so we need to raid the baby store, the bookstore, the food court, the clothes stores, the electronics store --"

Rogue smiled in amusement. "What, no listing exactly what we've got to get?"

Cocking her head, Jubilee declared loftily, "I'm preparing ahead for random, unexpected purchases."

"We're not purchasing anything," Bobby pointed out.

"Just let me have my little piece of normal, all right, Frosty?"

Bobby shook his head at Jubilee, then reached out to open the glass doors to the entrance of the mall.

The door wouldn't open.

Their good humor faded slightly as Bobby tried the other doors, all of them refusing to budge. "They're locked," he said, giving the others a tense look. The other three glanced at one another nervously, Rogue the only one showing the slightest bit of calm.

Whatever the Professor had done to kill off every non-mutant on the planet, he'd done it in the middle of the day.

If the doors were locked, someone had to be inside.

Rogue narrowed her eyes and glanced between Bobby and Jubilee, sighing heavily when she noticed that neither one of them looked all that eager to enter the mall anymore. "Stand back," she said, approaching the door.

Bobby was only too willing to back away from the front door, walking over to Jubilee's side and muttering, "I hate to say I told you so ..."

Jubilee glared at him. "No, you don't. You love saying that."

"Would the two of you quit it?" Rogue snapped.

Both Bobby and Jubilee went silent in an instant, and Rogue's gaze was already fixated on the door again when Jubilee leaned over and whispered to Bobby, "Sometimes, you cackle."

Rogue and Bobby glared over at her, and she almost appeared to shrink into herself as she blushed. "Right, shutting up."

Shaking her head, Rogue turned back to the door with singular concentration, and Bobby couldn't stop himself from blurting out, "So, what? Now you know how to pick locks?"

She didn't look back at him. "Sort of," she said, then grumbled something under her breath about cheap glass companies.

With a quick glance to both sides, she finally grabbed a standing ashcan off to her right and threw it through the glass door.

The others winced at the sound of shattering glass, tiny shards drizzling to the ground as the ashcan rolled into the shadowed depths of the mall.

All four of them peered into the silent darkness inside, half-surprised a surging crowd of crazed mutants wasn't pouring out of the opening in the door to attack. All eyes turned to Rogue, who stopped studying the interior of the store to look back at their accusatory expressions and flash them a confrontational glare.

"Worked, didn't it?"

The others frowned. Well, she had them there.

* * *

"Smell anything?"

Rogue stood in the center of the cosmetics department in Sears and gave a test sniff of the air. There weren't any bodies to be seen, and she suddenly had a mental image of some stressed-out mutant with no other place to go dragging bodies out of view, as if leaving them for their eternal rest in the paint aisle meant they'd vanish from existence.

She tested the air again and frowned as she glanced towards the photography department. Okay, so maybe they'd turned the photo place into the mall graveyard.

Bobby's words hit her out of the blue, and her frown fell away. "You mean, aside from the bodies?"

It showed just how far gone they all were that a pointed comment like that didn't even make any of the others flinch, and Rogue added, "I can't tell."

"You can't tell?"

Rogue wished she could argue the point, but saying it out loud, just like with everything else they'd seen in the past couple of days, made it startlingly, painfully true. If she really did say the words, "I've only had Logan's powers for two days," then Logan was dead and it was partially her fault and they wouldn't be able to peel her off the floor from all the crying she'd do.

Instead, she rolled her head on her neck with a satisfying crack of bones and twist of muscles and said, "The decay's too thick, even with the bodies gone. It's throwing me off."

Bobby's eyes narrowed, but he said nothing. Some things, none of them wanted elaborated upon.

Behind them, Jubilee bounded up to their side with a perky smile on her face and a glittery gel pen waving in the air as she added things to her list, the possibility of attack by scores of insane super-powered beings obviously having faded when the crazed hoards hadn't pounced right then and there. "So here's what I was thinking. You guys handle the practical stuff -- food, baby things, stuff like that -- and I'll go shopping for books, music, and toys. Anybody want a laptop, or --"

Rogue and Bobby stared at her in confusion. "You honestly think splitting up is a good idea?"

Jubilee flashed an annoyed glare at Bobby as she recapped her pen. "Remember that thing I said about the armed psychos with the bazookas? Well, I'm not seeing any and the bloodhound here's not picking up any attack squads, so I'm off to go shop." She reached out to give Bobby's cheek a patronizing pat, and he smacked her hand away with a frown. "Don't worry, Dad. I'll be sure to bring my stun gun." She held up her hands and snapped her fingers, an arc of electricity flickering into the air before she winked and darted off into the main atrium of the mall.

Bobby's worried gaze darted to Rogue, who shrugged. A squeak sounded to the side, and the two of them watched as Artie walked past pushing a fancy green baby stroller he had to have liberated from nearby, Charlie's tiny arms waving in midair as Artie rolled him past. Artie flashed the other two a calm grin, then patted the husky's head as he trotted beside the kid, following Artie into the mall.

"Well," Bobby said with a sigh, "I guess we're shopping then."

Rogue couldn't resist a wily grin as she tossed her dark hair from her eyes. "Poor you," she said. "If you're not all that excited about a little shopping, I guess you'll just have to come watch me try on clothes."

Watching her walk away, a smile crossed Bobby's face. "Finally, shopping I can get behind," he said trailing after her with a quiet laugh.

* * *

Saturdays at the mall meant trying on half of the new stock in the Gap, picking French fries and chicken fingers off everybody else's tray while hanging out at the food court, and foraging through the racks of CDs in the music store. And then the guy at the counter would make some snarky remark about looking and not buying, and Jubilee and her friends would roll their eyes and head back out into the mall to window-shop at Banana Republic or crack jokes about the T-shirts at Hot Topic. It was like a tradition or something.

Here, the guy behind the counter stared with eyes vacant of life, fixated without blinking at the extinguished fluorescent lighting in the ceiling. Blood stained the front of his store uniform, she guessed from a vicious nosebleed when everything had gone really southbound and fucked up.

She didn't think it needed to be said or even thought, but Jubilee really missed the snarky guy who just wanted her to buy something.

She took a deep breath to steel herself, then instantly regretted it. The sick, sweet smell of decay had become achingly familiar in the past couple of days, but that didn't stop her from gagging and barely managing to keep down the Pop-Tarts they'd all had for breakfast. Coughing, Jubilee glanced around the store checking out the body count. One behind the counter, two in the Rap section, three in the Country and R&B aisle, and one guy who'd keeled forward in front of the headphones and taken out a display of radio headsets.

Going through her options, Jubilee stood up straighter and headed towards the Rock section.

Her fingertips drifted over the CD cases of display, and a strange, calm sensation came over here. _Okay, see, **this **is what home feels like_, Jubilee thought with a hesitant grin. _Sort of like the way Kitty gets a little spazzy in a CompUSA. _

She stopped in front of the rack of rock CDs farthest from any bodies, glancing in their direction with a grimace before plucking a CD from the row in front of her. Her grimace didn't go away when she dragged her gaze back to the CD in her hand. Nickelback? "What are these losers doing in the rock section?" she muttered, then made a face and tossed the CD onto the floor. Maybe she could reorganize the place before she left. You know, give the grateful dead rotting on the floor a little musical re-education.

At random, she picked another CD from the rack, then beamed at the cover. "Ooo, U2." She skimmed over the back cover, biting her bottom lip and contemplating taking the CD with her. It's not like anybody would mind, right? And after all, it wasn't like it was stealing. Who the hell was she supposed to pay? And seriously, she'd been meaning to pick their new album up anyway, because the next time they went on tour, she had to know the words to --

Jubilee never completed the thought. She was too busy bursting into tears.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," she groaned, swiping at the tears with the back of her hand. Of all the times she'd pick to just start bawling, she went with the second she realized the U2 tour was cancelled due to a lack of living band members? Sniffling, Jubilee tried to compose herself as she said to herself, "Yeah, this isn't officially the stupidest thing I've ever done."

She giggled hoarsely, dragging her fingers through her hair to get her bangs out of her eyes.

Elsewhere in the store, an ominous clatter sounded.

Jubilee froze and narrowed her eyes as she glanced around the room, her fists clenching at her side. The air crackled as the faint scent of ozone drifted up from Jubilee's hands, her powers flickering to the surface at the first sign of trouble. And if anything counted as trouble, any hint that somebody might be sneaking around the place that she didn't know sure as hell counted.

"Is somebody there?"

She winced as soon as she said it, shaking her head. "People get killed in horror movies for smarter moves," she muttered, the electricity emanating from her hands dissipating briefly from the distraction.

And that was when the mysterious stranger pounced.

Well, okay, 'pounced' was giving her a little more credit than she probably deserved, considering she ran out of nowhere with a Nerf bat and went directly for Jubilee's head. And 'mysterious' didn't quite cut it, either, Jubilee would have thought, if she wasn't too busy trying to fend out the blows from a whiffleball bat to notice the upset girl with the reddish-brown curls, who probably couldn't have been any less mysterious if she'd had her deepest, darkest secrets tattooed to her forehead.

Not that Jubilee was up to nitpicking ... not with all of the head-whacking going on.

"Ow," Jubilee yelped, stumbling backwards into the M-R rack of the Rock section and knocking over a display of movie soundtracks. The girl bit her bottom lip and choked back another wave of tears as she lifted the bat to hit Jubilee again, and Jubilee found the time to compose herself, tiny bolts of electricity dancing from her skin. "Hey, knock it off!" she snapped.

The girl didn't seem to hear her, too upset to hear much of anything at that point, and Jubilee raised her hands fully intending to go for a low, stun-gun level of current, squeezing her eyes shut so she wouldn't have to watch.

Instead, there was an abrupt absence in the space in front of her followed by a weak struggling sound and Bobby calling her name, and Jubilee's eyes flew open to be confronted by the sight of Rogue yanking the girl away from her, gloved fingers pulling the bat from her hands and tossing it to Bobby. With careful, controlling movements that both Bobby and Jubilee would have considered foreign and strange from Rogue a week ago, she pushed the girl to the ground in a way that she was going for restraint with a strong hint of intimidation and quickly straddled the girl's hips before she could get up or wriggle away.

The girl's wide brown eyes stared up at Rogue as she trembled like a frightened kitten, and Rogue leaned down to glare at her with a predatory gleam in her eyes. When she spoke, her words came out gruff and harsh, and both Jubilee and Bobby exchanged a look that said that her absorbing Logan's essence might not have been a bad thing after all.

"Princess," she said to the girl, "you got a problem or somethin'?"

* * *

Of course, not everybody was busy enjoying the sight of Jubilee being whacked over the head with a plastic kid's toy.

Off in the Best Buy, Artie dragged his fingertips along the shelf of DVDs with a contented smile as he pushed the stroller along in front of him. Movies were probably his favorite things in the whole world, the one thing that nearly everybody in the mansion was willing to share with him. It was one thing when you wanted to get into a TV show or something like that, but people were more apt to want a silent partner to watch movies with. That, he could handle.

And now there wouldn't be any new ones for a while, if ever again.

Artie sighed and stopped walking, not as depressed as he would have thought about that concept. After all, there were thousands of movies yet to watch, silent comedies and black-and-white adventures and R-rated films he hadn't even gotten the chance to see yet. It was kind of comforting, actually.

Besides, he could always show Charlie what was so great about movies. _Toy Story_, _Bambi_, _The Goonies_ ... the kid would get all of the classics.

Leaning over the stroller, Artie peered down to see the baby's lips working at an invisible nipple as he slept, his pacifier having fallen from his mouth and his tiny hands resting on his chest. Artie liked the kid, even if he was now the hardest thing they had to deal with. Sure, he was small and cried a lot and ejected more fluids than he took in most of the time, but he didn't care that Artie didn't talk to him and he was amazed and astounded by Artie's forked tongue. He'd coo and wave his arms at the stupid thing every time Artie stuck it out like he was some sort of snake charmer and his forked tongue was the flute.

Artie reached down with a grin and stuck the pacifier back in the baby's mouth, and Charlie flinched awake for an instant before letting his eyes close once again and drifting back to sleep.

Huh, Artie thought as his grin widened. He was pretty good at this whole babysitting thing.

Off to the side, Artie caught a glimpse of a flat screen TV display, a huge wall-hanging monstrosity that made Artie give a happy whimper at the sight. He'd begged the Professor for a flat screen TV in the common room for months, writing carefully worded and seriously argued reports about the subject with the attitude of a do-gooding young politician trying to save a homeless shelter. The Professor had accepted every report with an amused smile and a red pen in hand, using Artie's papers as a grade for a debating class. Hell, the school didn't even have a debating class, but Artie was pretty sure he'd nearly gotten the Professor to crack before --

Well, _before._

Artie stifled the urge to think about the remnants of the school's jet strewn across the side of a hill and plucked a copy of _Ice Age_ from the shelf next to him. He awkwardly guided the stroller towards the display with his elbows while pulling off the plastic on the DVD case with his fingers, finally stopping right in front of the massive screen.

Artie straightened the stroller to face the screen and looked down at Charlie. Sure, the baby was asleep now, but if the noise woke him up, he'd get to experience a really cool show.

Walking over to the TV, Artie searched for the on switch and finally found it, flicking the thing on with a contented smile. The screen quickly filled with black-and-white snow, something Artie had expected, and he toyed with the channel buttons as he tried to figure out how to --

He got as far as channel three before the snow went away and was replaced by a bright red screen.

Artie frowned at first, thinking it was just the same sort of title card TV stations put out on their signals when there wasn't anything playing, sort of like a default setting. Everything shuts down, the screensaver comes up.

Then it hit him that none of the other TV stations were showing the same thing.

Glancing around as if he expected someone to pop out of the shadows and own up to putting the thing on there, Artie flipped back to channel three and was confronted once again by the bright red screen. He stared at the bold black letters that said, PLEASE TUNE TO THIS STATION FOR EMERGENCY DETAILS, and let himself relax a little.

Until he noticed the words written in slightly smaller text below it.

WELCOME TO THE NEW WORLD.

The TV was off before he knew his finger was on the power button, and Artie let loose with a ragged breath as he took a few stumbling, backwards steps in the direction of the stroller. He'd made it up in his head, is what he'd done. Yeah, that was it. Big, scary mall all by themselves, shadows full of ghosts all over the place. He was just seeing things to frighten the hell out of himself. Because otherwise --

Yeah, he really didn't want to think about the 'otherwise.'

"Hey, Artie!"

Bobby's voice echoed down through the empty expanse of the mall, and he looked genuinely surprised when Artie jogged out of the Best Buy one floor below him almost immediately with the stroller in front of him and the husky at his heels. Artie raised his gaze to see Bobby standing at the railing of the second floor down by the food court, waving his arms to get his attention.

"C'mon, we've got a surprise," he called out.

Artie forced a smile at that, then, taking a moment to glance nervously over his shoulder at the flat screen display, he patted the dog's head for reassurance and headed for the escalators.

* * *

Jubilee had never made a good sick person, being one of those people who firmly believed that whining as much as was humanly possible was the best way to better physical health. But at least with colds and the flu and one particularly nasty case of teenage chicken pox, during which Jean had trotted every other student in the mansion who'd missed out on chicken pox through her room in an attempt to get _that_ worry out of the way, Jubilee managed to restrain herself for the most part.

However, injuries -- twisted ankles and broken fingers and dislocated shoulders -- always made the whining just that much worse. She'd managed to keep quiet about her wrist for the most part, but the others mostly attributed that to the fact that they'd had worse things to worry about. Now that the shock of the end of the world was starting to wear off and she had an injury she could gleefully blame on someone else, Jubilee was pulling out every whine and pained facial expression in her arsenal.

Jubilee groaned as she grasped her head, darting the occasional annoyed glance in the direction of the girl, who sat across from her at the table in the food court looking more and more guilty with every accusatory look from Jubilee's dark eyes. Scowling, Bobby finished putting ice cubes in the T-shirt he'd grabbed from one of the shopping bags lying on one of the nearby tables, then wrapped up the ice cubes and none-too-lightly put the balled-up T-shirt down on Jubilee's head.

She grimaced at the rough treatment and gave Bobby a look that threatened his firstborn as he went to sit next to a highly amused Rogue.

The girl glanced up from the cold French fries she'd filched from the Burger King and blushed. "I'm sorry I hit you," she said, then gave Jubilee an odd look that wasn't so much apologetic as it was quietly assessing.

"Okay, 'hit' is not the word," Jubilee said, clutching the makeshift compress to her head with her good hand. "'Pummel' is the word."

Rogue stopped rolling the stroller back and forth on its wheels to roll her eyes. "It was a whiffleball bat, Jubilee."

"Hey, just because it was made out of ..." Everybody's gazes narrowed at her, and she backed down, although not a lot. "... admittedly lightweight plastic doesn't mean that I don't have a concussion."

"No, your lack of a concussion means you don't have a concussion," Bobby said.

Jubilee frowned and let the compress slip in her grasp. "All right, so maybe I don't have a concussion," she admitted, but quickly added, "But I do have some kind of brain injury."

Stifling laughter, Bobby shook his head and pointed in Jubilee's direction as he flashed Rogue a mocking smile. "Notice how she sets up all of these great punch lines with one little comment ..."

Jubilee's brows knit together as she scowled, making a dark look far too cute to be anywhere close to threatening. "If you weren't chilling my ice pack and putting rocks in my soda, I'd so do something mean and childish to you later on," she said to Bobby.

"Yes, but you're above that now."

"What with the swollen lump on the top of my head."

Her gaze darted in the girl's direction again, and the girl sank down in her seat. "I said I was sorry," she muttered defensively.

"Yeah," Jubilee said as she pushed the compress back into position again. "I'll make sure the lump gets the message."

The baby chose that moment to whimper fitfully in his stroller, and Rogue frowned at Jubilee as if it were her fault the baby had woken up before picking Charlie up and cradling him in her arms. Her gloved fingers drifted over his head in a calming caress before she said, "Can we talk about something other than Jubilee getting hit over the head with a hollow plastic bat?"

"Why do we have to stop?" Bobby asked, still grinning.

"Keep it up, Frosty," Jubilee snapped, waving her injured hand in his direction. "That's a really easy way to get yourself gravity-defying hair for the next week and a half."

Bobby shook his head at her reaction, taking a sip of the large soda he'd been drinking from, then glanced over at the girl and said, "You got a name, or are we sticking with Sammy Sosa?"

Her green eyes widened nervously, and she swallowed the fry she'd been eating. "Jane," she said. "Jane Moore."

Rogue gave her a gentle smile, rocking the baby in her arms to get him to calm down. "I'm Marie," she said, "and that's Bobby, Artie --" She tilted her head towards Artie, who stopped feeding the husky bits of hamburger to smile and wave. "-- the whining lump over there is Jubilee --" Jubilee made a face at Rogue that would have had Storm giving her a stern warning if she'd still been around to do so, but made up for it by flashing Jane a weak grin. It wasn't much, but it was better than what she'd been getting from Jubilee since they'd left the music store. "-- and this is Charlie."

She lifted the baby up a little, and Jane gave Charlie the same quietly assessing look she'd given Jubilee earlier. Then her gaze drifted to Rogue's face and that assessing look intensified, as if she'd suddenly discovered a problem and her mind was mentally flipping through her options of how to fix it, like an expert mechanic hunched over examining the non-working insides of a Porsche. Rogue narrowed her eyes at Jane's expression, and as soon as she noticed that she was being watched, Jane shook off the intense concentration on her face and looked around at everybody.

"You're all mutants, too, aren't you?"

The others exchanged a look, a little surprised that she'd figured it out. Not that it had been difficult -- Bobby and Jubilee had been the only ones she'd seen using their mutant abilities, but with Rogue wearing opera gloves for seemingly no reason and Artie not talking, it probably wasn't much of a stress to guess that the one thing they all shared was the mutant gene.

But the way she said it ... it was as if she'd already known what had happened.

"Yeah," Bobby said.

Jane nodded, tucking a loose red-brown curl behind her ear. "I thought so. I mean --" She glanced around at the others, took a deep breath, and fought desperately to keep the fearful shadow in her eyes from growing. "I work here in the mall, and when it happened, I was getting lunch in the food court. First me, these two other kids, this guy on the second level ... we went all spazzy and everybody thought we were having convulsions. But then ..." She took a swig of her soda, looking like she were really wishing it would turn out to have magically changed into liquor, then said, "The others made a run for it after everybody else collapsed. At first, I thought it was one of them who'd done it."

Rogue glanced around the place with barely restrained revulsion, trying to imagine what it must have been like. The Jane in her head stood in line in front of the Chinese place when she collapsed, a few people coming to her aid before they suddenly realized she wasn't the only one crying out in agony. Then a minute later, they stopped writhing in pain, only for everybody else in the building to fall to the ground.

Swallowing a terrified sound that threatened to rise up in the back of her throat, Rogue clutched the baby tighter to her chest. "And you stayed here?"

Jane shook her head. "I went home to check on my mom first," she said, paling a little. She gave the others a pointed glance, and they didn't even have to imagine what she'd seen when she'd left the building. They'd already seen it driving up to the mall. Shrugging, she looked down at the fries she had left and poked at them as she said, "After I buried her, I came back here. It seemed like a good idea at the time."

Jubilee gave Bobby a "Told you so" look as the mood dampened at the thought of what it must have been like for Jane, all alone in this town as the bodies fell around her and her fellow mutants deserted her. Their experience hadn't been any better than hers, but at least they'd had each other around to keep from going insane from loneliness. The fact that she seemed pretty stable was damn impressive, considering.

Sensing the change in everybody, the dog made a chuffing sound as he stopped taking pieces of meat from Artie and padded over to Jane's side. He rested his muzzle on her knee and looked up at her with sad, "Pet me before I die" puppy-dog eyes.

Unable to resist, Jane reached down with a smile and petted the top of his head, sliding her fingers over the soft gray fur. "Does he have a name?"

Everybody else gave each other the same amused, eye-rolling expressions they'd been flashing one another regarding the dog's name since they'd read the dog's collar before leaving the house in Dog Creek. "His name is Dumbledore," Bobby said.

Jane cocked an eyebrow and frowned in disbelief.

Putting the now-soaked compress down on the table, Jubilee grinned and pointed at Jane. "Hey, that's the same face I made," she said.

Jane ignored Jubilee as she gave Bobby a pointed look, which made Bobby squirm and say, "Yeah, we're working on something better."

"How long did you think you could stay here?" Rogue asked, changing the subject. "Until the electricity went out?"

"My dad worked on the maintenance staff here for as long as I can remember until he moved to Chicago." Jane shrugged as she sat up straighter in her chair. "Running the generator's not that hard. I could have lasted ... you know, a while."

She glanced furtively at everybody else, probably presuming they wouldn't buy it. Rogue would have been the first one to call her on it, if there hadn't been somewhat less of Logan in her than there had been the last couple of days. Not that he was gone or anything -- he'd never be gone from her, if the Professor's theories about her abilities had been correct -- but Logan would have taken one whiff of the air in the mall, noticed the smell of corpses from almost every store in the mall a young woman would normally avoid, and declared that there was no way in hell he was leaving her alone there unless she wanted to catch something and die.

Of course, Logan's voice pointed out in her head, maybe that was the whole reason she was doing it.

Jubilee glanced around at the others and sighed when she noticed how depressed everybody looked all of a sudden. If there was one thing she couldn't handle, it was abrupt emotional discomfort on a group level. The last few days had seriously been testing her patience in that arena, that was for damn sure. Getting up from the table, Jubilee said, "Okay, you know what? Let's think about something else entirely before one of us has a spazz attack. You two shop for groceries, Artie's got the rugrat shopping covered, and Barry Bonds and I will go do some serious clothes shopping." Jubilee tugged Jane to her feet before she could protest, slung an arm around the other girl's shoulders and said, "What size are you, slugger?"

Momentarily stunned, Jane said, "Uh, a size twelve in jeans, and ... uh ..."

"You know what you'd look great in?" Jubilee blurted out as she steered Jane around a pair of tables tilted into the aisle and towards the nearest women's clothing store. "Blue. A really bright pretty shade of sapphire blue. Ten bucks says it'd totally make your eyes even brighter."

Jubilee darted a meaningful glance in Artie's direction as she led Jane away, and Artie nodded in understanding as he bounded off into the depths of the mall, leaving Rogue and Bobby alone.

Bobby leaned forward in his seat and looked over at Rogue. "So, what do you think?"

"Let's leave her here."

He frowned. "Are you serious?"

"No, that was my sarcastic voice," Rogue said matter-of-factly. Her gaze drifted over the food court as if imagining what it had been like before Jane had gone at it with a strong back, a bucket of cleaning products, and a sincere desire not to lose a tenuous grip on reality. Her mental image of the aftereffects of the Professor's powers on the mall weren't exactly pretty. "She's going to get sick if she stays in her any longer. Dead people all over the goddamn place and a pretty obvious lack of proper ventilation? She's just begging for a nice respiratory infection or something even worse to kill her."

Nodding, Bobby glanced off in the direction Jubilee had led Jane off towards and rose from his seat. "Do you think she'd come with us?"

Rogue put the baby back in the stroller and looked up at him with a sigh. "I don't think she's got much of a choice."

* * *

It turned out that Jane had cleared the bodies of the dead from nearly every decent store in the mall. Starbucks and Burger King had both been scrubbed down, Borders didn't even smell like anything other than a couple emptied canisters of spicy air freshener, and Old Navy looked like it probably had the day it opened.

If Jane had been looking for a way to make up the whiffleball bat incident, clearing Old Navy of corpses was more than enough for Jubilee.

Ruffling her hair away from her eyes before slipping her sunglasses up to hold her bangs out of her eyes, Jubilee leaned back against one of the T-shirt displays and watched Jane rifle through a rack of jeans looking through the size twelves. She hadn't really said much about herself after Jubilee had led her off to play dress-up, other than that she'd worked as a clerk at the music store and had set up a sleeping bag in the romance novel section at Borders. But Jubilee was nothing if not curious, and she couldn't help but stare at Jane as if a pop-up window would suddenly appear before her in the air with her mutant abilities spelled out in big bold letters.

Jane glanced up from the jeans to see Jubilee look pointedly down at the stack of pumpkin-colored T-shirts next to her and sighed as she let go of the jeans. "All right, go on. Say it. You know you want to."

Jubilee's dark-eyed gaze darted in Jane's direction, and she stared at Jane for a long moment before saying, "So what do you do, anyway?"

Jane opened her mouth as if she were about to blurt it out, then glanced towards the door and shook her head. "I shouldn't --"

"Oh, come on. Now's a bad time for secrets, princess. What do you --" Jubilee held up her own hands, electricity arcing from one set of fingertips to the other in a flickering curve over her head. "-- you know, _do_?"

Jane blushed, then said, "Nothing, really."

"Dude, if it were nothing, we wouldn't be playing Dodge This Crappy Denial game." She flashed Jane a reassuring smile, then said, "Spill already. I mean, I don't care if you spontaneously spawn orgies with ugly people at this point. I'm just happy to see someone who's not dead or one of the same goofballs I've been seeing for the past couple of days."

"Do you promise not to tell?"

Jubilee frowned. As much as she wanted to know what made Jane so special, she wasn't sure keeping secrets from the others at this point was really going to help matters. "I don't know if --"

"Please?"

Something about the way Jane was staring at her made the lump on the back of Jubilee's head feel less like a bump and more like a bruise with an ego, and she sighed. "Okay, fine."

Jane almost seemed to sag with relief, and she held out her hands. "Let me see your wrist."

Reluctantly, Jubilee lifted her injured arm, and before Jubilee could stop her, Jane undid the straps on the brace and slipped it off Jubilee's arm, letting it fall to the ground. Jubilee scowled and tried to yank her arm away without making the dull pain still hanging over it any worse. "Hey, my wrist is still kind of ..."

Her voice trailed off as it suddenly struck her, the tingling sensation wriggling up her skin in a ticklish wave. It only took an instant for it to dissipate, fading away along with her pain and the sore swelling around her wrist. Jubilee could have sworn she saw Jane's fingertips glow briefly before the tingle dissolved, leaving behind unmarred skin and a wrist that twisted and bent without any pain at all.

Jubilee stared at Jane in awe as the other girl's hands fell away and Jubilee flexed her wrist in all directions. "It's not hurting anymore," she said. "At all."

Jane flashed her a gentle smile and started walking back towards the clothes displays. "So, blue to make my eyes brighter, right?"

"You heal people," Jubilee said, still trying to wrap her brain around it.

"Look, please don't say anything to anybody else, okay?" Jane choked out the words while still trying to sound calm and chipper, an upset girl pretending a fake day at the mall would make everything better. "I just don't want to tell anyone just yet."

Gaping, Jubilee continued to bend her wrist around as if sooner or later it'd start hurting all over again. Sure, Rogue could heal herself all she wanted now, but the rest of them were screwed if anything bad happened. "Why not tell anyone?" Jubilee practically yelped. "This is a good thing. This is a really, really good thing. I mean, our doctor _died_, for crying out loud."

"Everybody's doctor died, Jubilee," Jane snapped, making Jubilee flinch. Reining in her emotions, Jane took a deep, steadying breath and said, "Don't you get it? Everybody died, and they took all of the doctors with them. Seriously, how many mutant doctors do you think there are on the planet? And let's not even get into the fact that doctors make mistakes and lose patients, and I don't."

The first thing that caught Jubilee's attention was that the past couple of days alone in the mall had obviously left Jane alone with a lot of time to think about what being a mutant healer in a world like this would really mean for her. But instead of bringing it up, Jubilee heard herself blurt out, "You were working in a mall when you could have gone to med school?"

A wry smile crossed Jane's face. "Why would I need to go to med school?"

Jubilee shook her head at that. "Jane one, Jubilee nothin'," she muttered, even though a part of her wondered why someone with Jane's abilities would bother skipping out on med school. Going to college for something you could do naturally, never having to study or worry about losing a patient ... hell, it was thoughts like that that nearly made her consider going to school to be an electrical engineer for the past few years. Sure, she didn't have the best grades on the planet, but she also didn't have to buy batteries for her MP3 player if she was broke.

Recognizing the look on Jubilee's face, Jane walked over to the registers and hopped up to sit on the counter, cocking her head towards the register. "You know, we could crack this sucker open and pull out all the fifties, and we wouldn't have a single place to spend them. But whatever happened to everybody, it just turned all of our powers into legal tender." She shrugged sheepishly and said, "Not to brag, but some of us are way more valuable than the rest of you."

Jubilee couldn't help but smile awkwardly at that, and she walked over and sat next to Jane before she could say anything else. The two of them swung their legs back and forth in companionable silence for a long moment before Jubilee glanced over at Jane thoughtfully. "Do you want to know what really happened to everybody else?"

Jane's legs stopped swinging as her eyes widened. "You guys know?"

"Unfortunately," Jubilee said.

Then she started talking and didn't stop for anything.

Even when Jane burst into tears.

* * *

If John had stayed behind and survived the crash, Bobby would have bet twenty bucks that the two of them would have spent that night off by themselves in the Best Buy, hooking up a Playstation to one of the big screen TVs and fighting to beat one another's score while Rogue and Jubilee sat nearby and rolled their eyes. Instead, Bobby found himself propped up in the children's lit section of Borders on a sleeping bag, watching Rogue feed the baby with a wistful look in her eyes, the others quietly talking to one another and lying on sleeping bags out in the reading area on the other side of the bookshelf.

Propping the bottle up with her chin, Rogue reached out without looking and flicked on the radio beside her at a low level, just enough to keep the painful, all-encompassing silence at bay. Bobby's gaze darted over to the radio as he frowned. "Are you going to do that every night?"

She shrugged without glancing over at him as she grabbed onto the bottle. "It's too quiet."

"You'd think you'd like that now," he said.

She restrained herself from saying anything she'd regret and simply said, "You suck at being subtle, you know that?"

Bobby stared at her, but she didn't bother looking up from the baby. Instead, she gifted the baby with a soft smile and said, "Where do you think Magneto went?"

Taking a deep breath, Bobby closed his eyes and wished he didn't have to think about that. But John was with Magneto, and Magneto hadn't crashed as far as they knew, and that meant he was still out there somewhere. "He would have run out of gas before long," Bobby pointed out.

"He was in a helicopter made out of metal," Rogue said. "He didn't need gas."

That was true, Bobby thought with a frown. "They could have gone anywhere."

"Where do you think they would have gone?"

"Magneto just established a new world order. He'd have to go somewhere heavily populated to get a good foundation going for whatever he's got planned now."

She thought about it for a moment as she put the bottle aside and raised Charlie to her shoulder to be burped. "Los Angeles, maybe? It was closer than New York."

Bobby shook his head. "New York's too close to the school," he said. He tried to focus on Jubilee, Artie, and Jane whispering to one another in the reading area to try and distract himself, but couldn't focus with the prospect of Magneto on the loose clouding his thoughts.

"He could have gone to the school, you know," she said matter-of-factly. It wasn't something either one of them wanted to think about, but she figured one of them had to put that option out there. She looked over at him with something dark and haunted in her eyes and said in an eerily familiar, arrogant tone. "'Look how Xavier's vision crumbled before him. Mutantkind will rule this new world of ours.'"

Bobby shivered at the sound of her voice, then said, "Hell, it's already worked once."

Rogue sighed and stroked her gloved fingertips over Charlie's head as she shifted him down from her shoulder. "Have you wondered yet what it'll be like?" She cocked her head towards Charlie. "For him, I mean?"

Bobby's gaze rested on the baby, imagining what a life in a world populated solely by the last few mutants would be like. "Well, he'll probably be the only one in his kindergarten class," he said, unable to keep a wry smile from crossing his lips.

"That's not what I meant," she said.

"Yeah, I know."

Bobby held out his hands, and Rogue took the silent prompt to hand Charlie over to Bobby. The baby made a few snorts and grunts as Bobby settled the baby in his cradled arms, then settled down and simply stared up at Bobby in fascination. Meanwhile, Bobby looked down at the kid and pictured his future ... never knowing anyone who wasn't a mutant, being one of the few kids his age to survive, running around in an empty world devoid of people. How the kid could make him feel hopeful and incredibly depressed all at once was one of the few things he didn't like about Charlie.

"Once upon a time," he suddenly heard himself say, as if weaving a fairy tale would make him feel better about the whole thing, "there was a little boy named Charlie who lived in a magical land of sorcerers and witches. He had a really cool big brother who could use his tongue to tie his shoelaces --" He was sure he heard someone on the other side of the bookshelf giggle, but tried to ignore it. "-- and a big sister who could make lightning crash through the air, and a daddy who could make ice statues for the king --"

Rogue made a strange choking sound at his side. "Daddy?"

He tried to shrug it off, but he couldn't bring himself to give a solid argument. "Fictional Charlie's daddy," he said, but he said it with a smile, and Rogue wasn't about to dig any deeper. Bobby's gaze connected with Rogue's, and for the first time in two days, he found himself looking at Marie again, not Rogue, and not the girl who'd absorbed the last bit of life from Wolverine. "And a mommy who was the fiercest warrior in the land," he said softly, eliciting a soft grin from Marie.

His gaze focused on her lips, tugging upward into that hopeful grin, and he couldn't help but remember how they'd felt beneath his for that brief instant in his bed--

"This bedtime story sucks," Jubilee yelled from the other side of the bookshelf. "When is something going to blow up?"

Rogue and Bobby heard Artie and Jane dissolve in barely stifled giggles on the other side of the bookshelf, and Rogue got to her feet so that she could glare over the bookshelf at the others. "Jubilee, go to sleep or you'll come to in a thousand years in a block of ice," Bobby said.

Jubilee shot up from the other side of the bookshelf and scowled at the both of them, then lifted a phone from her side and plopped it down unceremoniously on the shelf in front of her. Placing the receiver to her ear with her injured hand, the wrist brace sloppily stuck together on her arm, she said, "Do you hear the way he talks to me, Kitty? Tonight when he goes to sleep, me and Jane are sneaking over there and duct-taping his mouth shut."

Jane laughed again at that, but Bobby and Rogue both froze. "You're talking to Kitty?" Rogue asked.

Jubilee narrowed her eyes at the both of them and said with the most mature tone of voice they'd heard from her in months, if not ever, "One of us had to eventually." Rogue looked back and forth between the phone and Jubilee with hesitant fear, causing Jubilee to roll her eyes and lean casually against the bookshelf. "Oh, don't look at me like that. It's not like we're planning funerals or anything. Mostly, we're just making fun of you people." She held out the receiver. "Want to talk to her?"

The two of them stared at the receiver as if it would grow teeth and bite their ears off if they took it, and Bobby managed to say in a quiet voice, "Maybe another time."

"Suit yourself," she said with a shrug, then held the receiver up to her ear. "Rogue wants to know if you've had to eat Pete yet."

Rogue gasped. "Jubilee!"

"No, not like that, you perv," she said into the phone with a roll of her eyes. "For _food_." Then she looked up from the phone and gave Rogue a dirty look. "Neither one of you thinks like a person, you know that? You're having dirty thoughts, and I'm thinking about how long fifty people could live off a guy who's six and a half feet tall and weighs as much as the rest of us put together."

She slumped back down to the floor with the receiver pressed to her ear, yammering on about things that definitely didn't involve dead people or the end of the world, and Rogue and Bobby exchanged a look.

"Is it scary that that actually made sense?" Rogue asked him.

Bobby frowned. "Just a little, yeah."

* * *

It was three in the morning when Rogue grabbed onto Bobby's shoulder and shook him hard.

"Bobby, wake up," she said.

He swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand to rub the sleep out of them and was confronted with the sight of Rogue lifting the baby from the crib they'd lugged into Borders. "What's going on?" he said, getting to his feet.

Rogue barely wasted a glance on him as she carried the baby over to the reading area. "I smell smoke," she said.

Bobby frowned. "Smoke?"

Oh, that wasn't good.

Stalking over to the reading area, she barked, "Wake up," at the others and barely waited for Artie to come to before shoving the baby at him. "Take the kid," she said as Artie got to his feet. When Jubilee didn't come to and get to her feet quickly enough, Rogue grabbed onto her shoulders and hauled her from her sleeping bag.

"Aw, come on," Jubilee said, struggling to her feet and shaking off Rogue's grasp. "I was having this great dream about Brad Pitt and --"

"The town's on fire."

Artie and Jubilee both stared at her as if she'd said the mall really was being invaded by zombies, while Jane froze and turned a terrifying shade of pale. "What do you mean, the _town _is on _fire_?" Jubilee said.

Rogue snatched the Hummer's keys from a nearby bookshelf and sidestepped the fidgeting dog to slap the keys into Jubilee's good hand, giving the loosely-strapped-on wrist brace a passing glance before saying, "How many interpretations of that could there be?"

"Well, when the roof's on fire, sometimes that's a good thing," Jubilee grumbled.

Artie gave her an annoyed look, and Rogue and Bobby both flashed her identical glares that told her she might be taking the denial thing to a whole new level of irritating. "Go get the car," Rogue snapped, grabbing the bag of new clothes Jubilee had liberated from the Old Navy and shoving it into her arms. "Park outside the front door. We're getting out of here."

Grimacing, Jubilee slipped her feet into her new shoes and stomped off through the door of the Borders that led out to the parking lot.

Rogue looked pointedly at Artie and cocked her head in Jubilee's direction. Artie didn't even pause, hurrying after Jubilee with the baby in his arms and the dog bounding out after them.

Beside Rogue, Bobby took an experimental sniff of the air that drifted into the store in Jubilee and Artie's wake and said, "I smell it, too."

Rogue nodded and started wrangling everyone towards the entrance back into the mall, but stopped when she noticed the dazed look on Jane's face. "Fire?" the other girl asked weakly.

"Something that didn't get shut off probably shorted out," Rogue said with a shrug, trying to be as calm as possible about the whole thing. They could get away from the fire in time -- that wouldn't be a problem from the smell of it -- but the mall would still burn within hours of their leaving. Considering the bodies rotting away in other parts of the mall, maybe that was a good thing. "Just because you shut off everything in the mall doesn't mean you were safe," Rogue pointed out to Jane.

Jane flinched and Rogue added, "That's not me blaming you, by the way."

Not waiting to see what other unnecessary reaction the girl was about to have, Rogue stalked towards the entrance to the mall and smoothly swung the baby's bag onto her shoulder in one deft movement. "If there's anything you want before we leave, now's the time to shop," she said.

She didn't have to look after the other two to know they were hurrying just as fast as she was.

* * *

Ten minutes later, Rogue emerged from the front of the mall with four large shopping bags filled with baby clothes, diapers, and whatever food she could salvage from the restaurants in the food court. Say what you would about Jubilee, but at least she'd taught her friends how to raid a mall like they were in the middle of a shopping spree, if need be. It was either go fast, or get stranded at the mall after one of Jubilee's "move it or lose it" declarations.

She walked out of the mall to an eerie sight.

The smoke she'd scented in the air now wafted past on the breeze in thick, noxious tendrils that immediately made Rogue start to cough. She shook it off before it got any worse and walked around to the back of the Hummer, trying desperately to ignore the glow on the horizon and the red-orange flicker that appeared every few seconds over the tree line surrounding the parking lot.

"Jesus," Bobby said as she loaded up the back of the Hummer, avoiding the dog as she stuffed the bags into the back and ducking under Bobby's arm as he held the trunk open without looking. All of them seemed to be fixed on the sight, Rogue noticed, which wasn't exactly helpful.

She pushed Bobby away and made sure the dog was far enough back from the trunk before shutting it, stalking around to the passenger's side seat in the front without a word. Bobby finally snapped out of it and hopped into the back seat with a coughing Artie and Jane, who stroked a hand over the baby's bare forehead absently as he lay in the infant seat.

Jubilee leaned out of the open driver's side window and squinted at the flames flickering not far away. The soft roar of the fire sent chills over her skin. "Oh, that's not right," she muttered.

"Actually, it is," Rogue said, slamming the door shut behind her. "That's kind of the point."

"It might not make it over here," Bobby said from the back seat.

Rogue narrowed her eyes and pointed to the wall of flames on the other side of the tree line. It was on the far side of the parking lot, but the wind wasn't in their favor, and already smoldering bits of ash danced on the breeze past their windshield and towards the mall's facade. "Do you want to take that chance?"

Bobby squirmed at that, his gaze darting in Jane's direction. Jane looked at the fire with a crushing sadness, a great, hulking monster in the final stages of destroying everything she knew. "Are you okay?" Bobby asked.

She barely flinched, and all eyes turned back to look at her. Rogue's eyes filled with concern. "Jane?"

After a long silence, a harsh, ragged breath escaped her lips, and she barely brought herself to look at the rest of them as she said in a quiet voice, "Let's just go."

Jubilee gave Rogue a concerned look, then shrugged and started the Hummer, pulling out of the parking lot as fast as she dared. Avoiding the few bodies still lying on the ground, she eased her way out of the lot and headed off down the road towards the highway.

It took a very long time before Jane could pull her tired gaze away from the burning remnants of what had been her home.

And even longer before she could fall asleep and try to forget it.

* * *

Four days later at a gas station in Nebraska, Jubilee looked up from where she was sitting with her back against the storefront and frowned as she snapped her gum. Jane paced nearby, sipping from a lukewarm bottle of water and staring at the exact same thing that Jubilee was -- Bobby and Rogue standing in front of the doors to the gas station bathrooms.

Bobby took a deep breath. "Okay, on the count of three ..."

"Counting to three isn't going to make the smell any better in there, you know," Jubilee called out.

They both ignored her as Rogue said, "One ..."

Artie stopped playing with the baby in his arms long enough to shake his head, and Jane narrowed her eyes at the pair of them. "Are they going to do this at every bathroom stop?"

"Two ..."

Jubilee frowned at Jane's question. "Looks like it," she said, then held up the plastic bag in her hand. "Twizzler?"

"Three," Rogue said.

Bobby and Rogue flung open the doors to their respective bathrooms, and all of them groaned and made faces as the sickly sweet smell of a dead body mingled with the normal scents you'd associate with a gas station toilet saturated the air. Rogue and Bobby stumbled backward away from the sight of the dead, bloated body slumped on the toilet in the women's bathroom and the half-starved possum with the patchy fur coat that hissed at them from the men's room before crawling out into the parking lot.

Bobby coughed from the smell, holding the back of his hand up to his mouth as he glanced over at Rogue, green at the gills and bent over with her eyes shut and her hands clapped over her ears from what he could only guess was sensory overload. She'd gotten like that a handful of times in the past few days, when everything got too loud or too bright or the stench of the dead got too overwhelming. Intending to distract her, he asked, "So what do I win?"

Rogue glared up at him past the white locks of her dangling hair. "Nothing."

"What do you mean, nothing? Dead body, anyone?" He extended his arm in a sweeping gesture toward the ladies's room, where the dead woman leaned against the wall with her mouth hanging open in an ominous gape. Bobby tried to ignore it, almost afraid that if he looked over at the body, something disgusting would crawl from its open lips. Hell, that's always what happened in horror movies, and he had never been in a situation this close to a horror movie in his life.

"Live possum, anyone?" Rogue cocked her head towards the other side of the parking lot, where the possum still waddled slowly away, and the others watched it leave pretty sure it wouldn't make it much farther than the tree line without keeling over. "The bet was that it would be empty, and I'm pretty sure a hissing possum denotes a lack of emptiness."

"Yes, but we were betting on there not being a dead guy in there," Bobby said. "I win."

Rogue frowned. "Fine," she said, her voice a little more grumbly than usual. "You get to use the bathroom, then."

Grimacing at the look on her face, he forced a smile and extended his arm toward the empty bathroom with all of the grace of a game-show hostess. "Ladies first?"

Her expression darkened as she walked around him. "You think I can't handle pissing in the woods?" she practically growled, ducking past him and stalking towards the treeline with a Logan-esque roll of her shoulders.

Bobby watched her go with a sigh, silently reaching out to close the door to the ladies's room. On the ground, Jubilee finished chewing her Twizzler and said, "How's that being possessed by Logan thing going?"

He ripped his gaze away from the woods to glare down at her.

Jubilee wasn't fazed any more than she would have been two weeks earlier. "Not good, huh?"

Bobby didn't bother answering, choosing instead to stalk into the men's room and slam the door shut behind him.

Jubilee shook her head as Jane leaned against the wall next to her, tucking an auburn curl behind her ear as she watched Rogue disappear into the trees. "Why do I get the impression this Logan guy was kind of a jerk?" she said.

Shrugging uneasily, Jubilee picked through the Twizzlers left over in her bag as she tried to come up with a good explanation for Rogue's behavior over the past few days. 'Possession' was pushing it, but her constant snappish responses and her newfound urge to act first and think later weren't exactly that far off the mark. "He wasn't a jerk so much as ..." She bit her bottom lip as she tried to come up with something and finally looked up at Jane to say, "Okay, you know that TV show where the big guy and his dad build motorcycles and yell at each other a lot?"

"Yeah."

"Well, imagine they had a grumpier cage fighting amnesiac cousin with weird hair."

"Oh." It wasn't the best description in the world, Jane thought, but it certainly made for a vivid mental image. She frowned as her gaze drifted to Artie, dancing the whimpering baby around the parking lot while the dog padded away from a body lying on the pavement on the other side of the lot. "And she just ... sucked him up?"

Jubilee grimaced as she took a bite out of another Twizzler. "Sort of, except without the nightmarish euphemism."

Bobby chose that moment to emerge from the men's room, taking a deep breath of clean air that still smelled better than the air inside even with the few bodies littering the ground outside. Jubilee looked up at him and gave him a comforting smile. "Feel better?"

"Depends," he said. "Do you want any more cold drinks?"

Jubilee cocked her thumb towards Bobby as she flashed Jane a serious, reassuring look. "He's fine."

Artie came over to Bobby's side carrying the baby, and Bobby quickly transferred Charlie into his own arms, gifting him with a gentle smile and a tickling dance of his fingertips over the baby's midsection. Charlie whimpered again, the same tired sound he had been making since the day before. It was like he hadn't had the energy to cry, and even Jubilee, who mostly just saw the kid as a cute diaper-filling machine, had noticed the way he had avoided eating the past day or so.

"Hey, kiddo," Bobby said, running his hand over Charlie's head. The baby grunted and let out a shaky breath, and Jubilee darted a meaningful glance in Jane's direction as Artie tugged on Bobby's sleeve and pointed at the mini-mart. "Yeah, see if they've got any pints of ice cream that haven't leaked through yet," he said.

Artie nodded and bounded off into the mini-mart, the husky jogging at his heels with an excited bark.

As Bobby continued to rock Charlie to keep him from getting too agitated, Jubilee frowned up at him and asked, "He any better?"

Bobby shook his head. "Still coughing," he said, just as the baby decided to punctuate his statement with a choked rattle that didn't sound good to any of them.

Biting her bottom lip, Jane glanced down at Jubilee, who grabbed at her formerly injured wrist and narrowed her eyes pointedly up at Jane. She had avoided picking up the baby since she'd joined their little traveling gypsy tribe, something that even baby-phobic Jubilee had done once or twice since she had tossed away the wrist brace and claimed a full recovery. Jane's gaze would occasionally dart over to look at the kid, staring at Charlie with that weird assessing look of hers. Jubilee had been half-tempted to ask if there was something wrong with the kid, but she figured that if Jane had known something was wrong with the baby, she would have fixed it a long time ago.

Yet there she stood, watching Bobby try to keep the baby calm while Charlie sneezed once again.

Jubilee had to clench her fist to resist the urge to smack Jane upside the head.

But suddenly, Jane's quiet voice broke the silence. "Can I hold him?"

Bobby looked up from the baby to stare at Jane in thinly veiled shock, clearly surprised that she wanted to hold him after pretty much ignoring him for the past few days. After a quick glance in Jubilee's direction and a confused look after she shrugged, Bobby said, "Okay, sure," and walked over to hand Charlie to Jane.

She took the baby in her arms with the practiced ease of someone who had done it before, and often at that, and Bobby and Jubilee exchanged a look as she gracefully rocked him from side to side and hummed something that made Charlie immediately stop squirming in her grasp. Bobby's jaw tensed as if he were debating taking the baby back or not, but he spotted Rogue emerging from the woods and gave Jane a quick smile before jogging off to Rogue's side.

Jane plopped down on the ground next to Jubilee, shifting the baby in her arms as she looked over at Bobby and Rogue. She wriggled to the side so that Jubilee served as a buffer between them, hiding the baby from view as she rested her palm on the back of Charlie's head. "Are they watching me?"

Jubilee glanced over her shoulder, watching as Bobby talked to Rogue in hushed tones. Rogue's suspicious gaze darted over to the other two girls, but Jubilee flashed her most innocent, anti-"I-solemnly-swear-I-am-up-to-no-good" smile. After a moment's hesitation, she turned her attention back to Bobby, and Jubilee relaxed as the two of them started walking towards the Hummer.

"Nah, you're good," she said, looking over just in time to see Jane's eyes narrow as she stared at the baby's midsection. "What's wrong with him?"

"A cold," Jane said, then frowned and tilted her head to the side. Understanding dawned on her face, and her breath hissed inward as she cradled the baby closer. "Something's not right with his heart," she said quietly.

Jubilee frowned. "Like, a heart murmur?"

Jane shook her head, continuing to stare at the kid with her hand pressed firmly against his skin. "Rogue would have noticed," she pointed out in a distracted tone of voice. "I mean, with the hearing thing."

"Well, then, what's up?"

"Hell if I know." The baby suddenly let loose with two loud sneezes, startling the hell out of Jubilee with their strength. They didn't even sound like baby sneezes, instead coming out like the loud chest-rattlers of someone trying to clear out a phlegmy throat. The next thing she knew, Charlie's breath lost the wheezy edge it had gotten in the past day, and he opened his blue eyes to look up at Jane with healthy curiosity in his young gaze.

Jane looked over at Jubilee with a triumphant smile. "I just know I fixed it," she said.

Jubilee's dark eyes widened. "Already?"

Nodding, Jane shifted the baby in her arms, just in time for Rogue to step up to their side and kneel beside them. She flashed Jane a grateful smile, then reached out and ran her fingertip over the baby's nose, eliciting a much perkier smile from the kid. "He giving you any trouble?"

Jane and Jubilee exchanged a look, then lifted their gazes to Rogue with beaming, innocent smiles on their faces.

"Nope," they answered in unison.

* * *

"No such thing as traffic anymore."

Jubilee opened her mouth as if to argue that, then decided against it and popped a Dorito in her mouth. Pointing out the downsides of the apocalypse was against the rules of this little game, damn it, and for once she was going to play along. "We'll never have to pay credit card bills," she pointed out.

"Or mortgages," Rogue said, leaning across the picnic table to grab another chilled soda from Bobby.

Jane plopped down on the far end of the bench as she returned from crossing the rest area to get her knapsack out of the Hummer and said, "Britney Spears won't be making any more albums."

"And Adam Sandler won't be making any more movies," Jubilee added.

Bobby frowned as he looked up from the portable DVD player Artie had liberated from the Best Buy before they had left the mall. "Hey, I like Adam Sandler."

"You also like Coldplay and _Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle_," Jubilee said. "You have no taste, remember?"

A sarcastic smile crossed Bobby's face as he took another bite of the ice cream he had boosted from the mini-mart before they had left and kept cold until they had driven up to the deserted rest area off the highway. "Is this coming from the same girl who watched her _Van Helsing_ DVD so many times, the Professor had to buy her a spare copy?"

Jane nearly choked on her soda, her hand still jammed into her knapsack as she blindly rummaged for the hairbrush she'd stuck in there. "_Van Helsing_?"

Jubilee held up her hands in self-defense. "Hugh Jackman in leather pants. I rest my case."

On the other side of the bench, Rogue let her gloved fingertip drift over Charlie's chubby cheek as he fell asleep in her arms, slipping into unconsciousness without sneezing or breathing through a congested nose for the first time in days. "The baby's not coughing anymore," she said.

Everybody looked over at the baby, Jubilee flashing Jane a grateful look as Bobby leaned across the table to give the baby a better look. "Feeling better, short stuff?" he said, speaking softly so as not to wake him back up. In response, Charlie sighed without the slight rattle in his throat and snuggled deeper into Rogue's arms.

"It's a good thing it stopped," Rogue said, a smile crossing her face. "I was starting to get worried there."

"Yeah, the little bugger just bounces back from everything, just like a whiny little racquetball." Jubilee waved her fingers across the table at the baby. "Right, spud?"

Charlie chose that precise moment to whimper with the threat of impending wails, and Rogue narrowed her eyes over at Jubilee as she turned to hold the baby away from her. Jubilee frowned over at the baby. "That better not have been a commentary on my nicknaming abilities," she said, then turned to reach into her own purse, adding as a change of subject, "So, who wants to learn something new and interesting?"

The others groaned as she pulled a desk calendar from her bag, Bobby shaking his head in disbelief. "I can't believe out of all the things you boosted from the mall, a word-a-day calendar was one of them."

Jubilee gave him an imperious look over the top of her sunglasses. "Hey, I have to keep learning, right? I mean, since all of the teachers are dead and all." An uneasy silence descended over their little picnic, so Jubilee purposefully cleared her throat, flipped the calendar to a random date, and read from the page. "Gangrenous. Noun. Death and decay of body tissue, often occurring in a limb, caused by insufficient blood supply and usually following injury or disease."

Bobby's brow furrowed as he made a grab for the calendar. "Where did you get that thing, the Dahmer family bookstore?"

"What? It's not that bad." Jubilee stuck her tongue out at him before ducking out of his grasp and stuffing the calendar back into her purse.

"Yesterday's word was 'exsanguinate'," Rogue said.

Jubilee made a face and glanced around the empty rest area. "Well, at least they're words we can use," she muttered. Either no one had been at the rest area when the Professor had struck everybody down, or someone had passed by and cleared out of all of the bodies. Whichever option it was, they were all grateful for the decided lack of corpses.

There was a rustling sound from the far end of the picnic area near the exit ramp, and all of them tensed as a man in overalls and a Mets baseball cap emerged from the woods, looking around the rest area as if he was on the lookout for invading dinosaurs. It was too far away to clearly identify what he held in his hands, but it looked like a walking stick, and his grip on it tightened as soon as he spotted the kids at the other end of the rest area.

"Hey, you kids," he yelled, stalking towards them with an odd look on his face.

"What the hell is he doing?" Bobby asked.

Rogue frowned, putting Charlie into the baby carrier. "I have no idea."

He continued to walk towards them, gripping the walking stick at both ends as if it were a shield. "Hey!"

Jubilee leaned over to whisper to Jane out of the corner of her mouth. "Is he about to tell us to get off his damn lawn?"

Jane shrugged and shyly lifted a hand to wave hello. "Uh, hi!" she called out.

The man raised the walking stick in his hands and fired.

Every single one of them dived to the ground, Rogue pulling the baby carrier down with her as the loud noise made him wake up and wail in fear. Jubilee glanced over the top of the picnic table just in time for the man to fire another round at them, and she flattened herself on the ground as her gaze connected with Rogue's under the table. "That's a shotgun," she yelled.

Rogue frowned over at her. "Nice of you to notice," she called back.

Jubilee ducked down while the crazy bastard reloaded and started crawling across the grass. Bobby and Artie exchanged a worried look under the picnic table before Bobby turned to Jubilee and hissed, "What are you doing?"

"Going for the Hummer," she said without turning around. "Where did you think I was going, for reinforcements?"

Bobby suddenly wanted to throttle their walking stun gun for making a run for it at a time like this. "Why aren't you --"

A gunshot next to him startled the words from his lips.

Bobby looked up to see Jane standing next to him, a handgun in her grasp as she fired at the maniac. She didn't have the best aim in the world, but she sure as hell looked as if she knew what to do with a gun, which was more than Bobby could claim. Frowning, he grabbed onto the back of Jane's shirt and tugged her to the ground, giving the gun a look that might have set it on fire if he tried hard enough. "Where the hell did you get that?" he said as Jubilee started the Hummer in the parking lot.

"My book bag," she said, her eyes open wide and watching him with confusion.

"It's not like it made a wrong turn into your bag."

They all winced as another shot sounded over their heads, the baby bursting into loud, high-pitched wails that Rogue desperately tried to calm him out of doing. "My father taught me to shoot," Jane said, holding the gun in her hand as if she were about to charge back into the fray, ignoring another shot over their heads.

Bobby's jaw tensed as his fists clenched at his side. "Yeah, well, mine didn't," he said, and reached under the picnic table to send a wave of freezing air to coat the ground at the crazy man's feet. He suddenly stopped stalking towards them as the soles of his boots stuck to the grass, and he looked down at his legs in confusion.

Jubilee pulled the Hummer up on the grass not far from the picnic table and stuck her own arm out the driver's side window, shooting the shotgun from his hands with a wild arc of lightning. He flinched as the sudden flash knocked the gun from his grasp, sending it too far away on the ground to him to get it back.

Pushing the baby carrier towards Artie, Rogue got to her feet with barely contained rage and stalked towards the crazed man, who looked at her with wide, frightened eyes and said, "What the hell did you people do?"

He went down as soon as Rogue punched him.

She glared down at him with an annoyed expression, a gnat she could squash at any moment, and he only stared up at her for a moment before slumping unconscious on the ground before her. She rolled her neck on her shoulders until the bones cracked, giving her broken, healing knuckles a casual glance as she said, "Now, that was incredibly cathartic."

Jubilee beamed happily as she called out, "See? Cathartic! We're using the words in sentences and everything."

Bobby glared over at her along with Artie, but turned back to look down at the man after Artie handed him the baby carrier. "Why did he do that?" Jane asked quietly, staring down at their attacker.

Bobby's hand drifted over the baby's head, his fingers trembling in the wake of what had just happened. "Does it matter?"

Jane darted a glance in his direction, then sighed and shook her head. All of a sudden, she started as she looked towards a spot on the highway hidden by a long stretch of tall trees. "Did you guys hear that?"

Rogue narrowed her eyes in that direction and didn't deny it, but Bobby and Jubilee both stared off into the distance in confusion. "Hear what?" Jubilee asked Jane, tilting her head and squinting as if that would make it easier to see through the tree line.

She opened her mouth as if to say something, then frowned and scooped up her knapsack again. She dropped the handgun back into the bag as casually as she would have a cell phone or a CD player, and gave the unconscious man a dirty look that made Jubilee shiver. "Can we just get out of here before we get shot at again?" she said, zipping up her bag and stalking towards the Hummer.

Shaking her head, Rogue followed after her, glancing over at Bobby and muttering, "We really need to stop making this running away shit a habit."

Bobby could only nod in agreement.

* * *

They finally stopped hyperventilating as a group for the most part by the time Jubilee drove into the next town off the highway, twice the size of Dog Creek but with fewer bodies lining the streets. There weren't any, in fact, something that struck all of them at once as they got out of the Hummer in the parking lot of a day-care center.

"Nice town," Rogue said, removing the baby from his car seat and glancing around at the bare streets with thinly veiled suspicion. "Empty, too."

She flashed Bobby a look as he nodded in agreement. Rogue tested the scents in the air while Jubilee, Jane and Artie all walked over to the edge of the parking lot. They looked out at the Missouri River as it flowed on the other side of town, clearly visible through the deserted houses and abandoned cars. None of them was that tempted to go have a closer look, even if it meant seeing a place they had never been before. If it was like any of the other places they had been, any natural beauty the river had would be ruined the second the first body floated past.

Stopping in the middle of the lot, Rogue narrowed her eyes and started looking around for something. "Do you smell that?" she asked Bobby.

He nodded reluctantly. "Yeah, I was trying to ignore it, but thanks for pointing it out."

She made a face at him, then walked into the street with the others tagging along not far behind. She tested the air once again with one deep sniff, then made a grumbling sound in the back of her throat and turned towards the north side of town. Soon enough, they all saw exactly what she was looking at, and enough experience with the scents and sights that came with the end of the world had brought them to a point where all they could bring themselves to do was grimace in disgust.

The still-smoldering pile of bodies at the northern end of town had caught a few of the buildings further out on fire, sweeping a wave of flames over the nearest buildings but gratefully not reaching more than a block or so. Their ruins stood like charred wreckage on the landscape, set against the backdrop of the massive pile of blackened corpses.

_Well_, Bobby couldn't help but think sarcastically, _there goes the tourist industry._

"That's one way to keep all of the dead bodies from making you sick," Jane muttered, Artie nodding in agreement behind her.

"Oh, sure. A big giant barbeque." Jubilee shook her head in awe and said, "That must have required a hell of a lot of sauce."

Jane made a face and said, "You're gross, you know that?"

"I'm jaded by tragedy," Jubilee said defensively. "There's a difference."

Something moved between the houses down the block, and Rogue's grip on the baby tightened as Bobby drifted between them and whatever it was watching them. "I'm not the only who saw that, right?" he asked.

Suddenly, someone stepped out from between the houses, and they all flinched at the same time, Jubilee raising her hands and Jane reaching for her purse as a beefy guy in a letter jacket and a skinny kid with a baseball cap covering his shaggy green hair walked out into the street. As soon as they saw the group of strangers standing at the far end of the street, they both stumbled backwards and raised their hands in surrender. "Whoa! Hold off, would you?" The jock stared at Jubilee's raised hands with an odd look on his face, then said, "You don't have to shoot. We're unarmed."

Jubilee scowled at him in suspicion. "You honestly expect us to believe that?"

The jock frowned as he looked frantically over at the other kid, raising his hands higher as if that'd get Jubilee to lower her hands. Bobby briefly wondered how they even knew to flinch when she aimed her hands at them, but considering how the world had flipped upside down the past week, they had probably figured out that Jubilee pointing her fingers at them like cocked pistols wasn't some delusional greeting. "He's got green hair and I make plants grow," the jock called out. "That's it. I swear."

"Jubilee, put the hands down," Rogue said from behind her, pushing away the baby's bare hands with her gloved fingers as they tried to grab at her face.

Jubilee didn't even bother tearing her gaze away as her brown eyes narrowed on the jock and her hands continued to keep those ridiculous gun shapes. "What if that one attacks us with killer tomatoes?" she asked.

Artie shook his head as Bobby grabbed onto her wrists and gently tugged her hands down. "Okay, see, this is why the Professor cut off your access to Netflix," Bobby said, ignoring the glare she flashed him at that. He gave the jock and his green-haired sidekick an apologetic smile, and they both shared a look before letting their own hands fall to their side as Bobby and the others approached. "You guys got names?"

The jock grinned and held out a hand for Bobby to shake. "I'm Mike, he's Travis." He cocked his head towards the green-haired kid, who grimaced in what they all guessed was supposed to be a friendly smile that failed miserably in the attempt.

Meanwhile, Jane paused before she could follow the others and stopped at Jubilee's side while the smaller girl scowled at the others. "You okay?"

"Oh, yeah," Jubilee muttered, not taking her eyes off of Mike and Travis. "I'm just peachy."

* * *

"I just don't trust them."

Mike looked across the checked tablecloth at Jane and frowned skeptically. "You don't trust hot dogs?"

"Oh, come on," she said, poking at the hot dog left on the plate in the center of the table with a plastic fork. "They're made entirely out of the bits of the rat even the rat didn't think were worth keeping. Considering how much feces and rat tails there are in those things, I'm amazed they don't shamble off off the plate and try to attack us like tiny cooked rat zombies." She scrunched up her nose and bared her teeth at that, all while sticking out her arms and rocking from side to side like a mouse executing the shuffle of the undead.

Mike grimaced and pushed his own plate away, which still had two more hot dogs left on it. "Okay, now I don't trust hot dogs."

Sticking out his tongue, Artie gave Jane a dirty look before passing the hot dog in his hand to the husky.

"I'll second that," Jubilee said, even though the two hot dogs on her plate were still untouched. "Except replace 'trust' with 'digest'."

Rogue smiled at that, not looking up from the baby as Bobby laughed in the seat beside her. After they had made introductions all around, Travis and Mike had invited them for dinner at the best restaurant in town. They had all grinned skeptically at that, but the two guys had apparently cleared out a small Italian place on the opposite side of town, and after theyhad steered the newcomers into chairs in the dining room and lit some candles "to set the atmosphere," they had spent the rest of the night not letting anyone else even come into the kitchen, putting together a dinner that would have made anybody swear eternal devotion to them.

Giving his empty plate a quick glance, Bobby frowned and said, "Are there still steaks left?"

"There are lots of steaks left," Travis said in a magnanimous tone of voice. He readjusted the baseball cap on his head, green wavy locks sticking out all over the place, and leaned back in his chair. "Not that there are a lot of people eating them right now. Or a lot of people _to_ eat them, you know."

"Honestly," Jane said, then sighed dramatically as she ate another French fry. "I miss crowds. They were nice."

"I hated crowds," Travis said with a shake of his head. "That's half the reason I stayed in town instead of going to college. Sometimes, working at the bait shop is a hell of a lot better than going to school."

Rogue glanced up from the baby. "Bait shop?"

"My dad had a store by the river." Travis shrugged, a sheepish grin crossing his face as he cocked a thumb in Mike's direction. "I wasn't the college type. That was more Mike's gig."

Jane perked up, took in the jacket Mike was wearing, and said, "Oh, football scholarship?"

"Academic, actually," Travis said, unable to resist an amused smile as Mike squirmed under their stares, a tired expression on his face as if he had had this conversation before and gotten tired of it long ago.

"Botany," he said, his neck flushing bright red. "I was cheating."

Everybody chuckled at that, except for Rogue. She suddenly paused and frowned, sniffing the air briefly before giving Bobby an odd look and muttering something about having to put the baby to bed. She said her goodbyes as quickly as possible, giving everybody a rushed, tight smile before leaving.

Bobby watched her with concern until she walked out the front door, then -- figuring that with Logan in her mind, she could handle herself just fine -- bent down to the ice chest at his side and removed a bottle of Pepsi. Coating it with a thin layer of ice, he held it out for Mike to take. "Care for a frosty beverage?"

Mike gave him a reluctant nod and took the drink after sharing a quick look with Travis. "That's a neat trick," Travis said.

"Tidy, even," Jubilee muttered, quietly glaring across the table at Travis.

His smile wavered, but he quickly recovered and said, "So what can you do?"

Jubilee narrowed her dark eyes over at him. "Guys' dicks turn gangrenous and drop off when I sn--"

She suddenly stopped and let loose with an artfully feigned sneeze, and Travis flinched. Jubilee graced him with an apologetic smile and said, "Bless me. I've been sick."

Shaking his head in spooked amusement, Travis gave her a thin smile and got up to walk into the kitchen, Mike following close behind with the bottle of soda in his hand. As soon as they were gone, Bobby leaned over and hissed, "Gangrenous?"

Jubilee cocked an eyebrow. "I got to use it in a sentence, didn't I?"

"What the hell is wrong with you? These guys are the first sane people other than Jane we've seen in days."

She scowled at that and slid closer so that she wouldn't be heard as she whispered, "First off, I have three words for you -- 'Nerf bat concussion.' And secondly, you can't tell me you trust them."

"They seem like nice guys," Bobby said with a shrug.

She stared at him for a long moment as if his brain had quite abruptly spontaneously gelatinized and dribbled out of his ears in tiny gray leaks down the side of his neck. "Bobby," she said in all seriousness, "I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to think really, really hard about your answer." Then she took a deep breath and said each word as slowly as possible. "Where are the cows?"

He frowned as she glanced pointedly at the steaks Travis had already cooked that everybody else hadn't even bothered to eat yet. She couldn't possibly be insinuating what he thought she was ... was she? "They probably got the steaks out of a freezer, Jubilee. It's only been a week," Bobby said in annoyance. "The electricity's still on in a lot of places."

Jubilee didn't rip her steady gaze from his as she reached over to the wall and flipped the light switch.

The lights didn't turn on.

Bobby's face paled as he looked over at the kitchen door, and Jubilee cocked her head towards the candlesticks on the table, dripping with red wax as the lit candles stuck into them slowly melted from the flames. "Were we a little swept up in our romantic dinner?" Jubilee said in a condescending tone of voice. "I don't trust them or their stupid steaks."

Then she got to her feet and flashed the kitchen door a dirty look. "I'm going to check on Rogue," she whispered to Bobby. "Make sure she's still in one piece."

* * *

Bobby ran up the stairs to the bedroom of the house they had called dibs on, hoping he'd get to the top of the stairs to find Rogue peacefully sleeping in the bed with Charlie in the travel crib and his own sleeping bag spread out on the floor. Not that it'd be all that helpful with a quick escape, but he needed a sight that would calm him down, and he couldn't think of anything that'd calm him down faster than that.

"Rogue," he said as he walked through the doorway, and it was all he got out before he noticed what was going on.

Their bags had been repacked and piled neatly at the foot of the bed, and the only thing left for Rogue to do was dress the baby, who looked over at Bobby as if he were disturbed he'd had to wake up for this sort of punishment and was looking for some sort of pseudo-parental back-up. He wasn't going to find it with Bobby at the moment, that was for damn sure.

Rogue looked up at him as he entered the room, and a tight smile crossed her face. "Jubilee was right," she said. "Mark the date."

"Are you sure?"

"It smelled like a murder scene in there," she said bluntly. "I slipped Artie and Jane to get out of there and meet Jubilee at the car."

Nodding distractedly, he couldn't help but stare at her in wonder for a moment. He didn't think he could have handled it ... Logan's memories and powers and weird quirks all hers now, just in time for the end of the world. He couldn't begin to imagine how she was keeping from totally losing it, although he didn't doubt it was mostly due to the baby currently wriggling impatiently in her grasp. "There's cows running wild at every farm from here to Florida. Why the hell would they do that?"

"Because they're out of their fucking minds," she said bluntly. Bobby made a face at that, and she cocked an eyebrow. "Can you blame them?"

Well, she did have a point. Even if these two weren't probably all that sane to begin with, if this was what they'd resort to in an emergency.

He glanced over at the bags. "You packed already?"

"You don't know how fresh off the bone that meat was," she said, tugging on the last of the baby's clothes and lifting him into the air. "Jubilee's coming around with the Hummer. Take the baby."

She handed Charlie over into Bobby's waiting arms, the baby making only a few fitful snorts before going back to sleep in the cradled arms holding him. Bobby looked from the baby to Rogue in confusion as she tugged the gloves from her hands and examined her bare arms with a deep breath. "Why am I taking the baby?" he asked.

Absently running her fingers over the skin on the back of her hand, she suddenly grinned as if discovering a fun new toy and cracked her neck from side to side. "Because right now," she said, her eyes twinkling with mischief, "I really want to beat the shit out of someone."

* * *

"You sure about this, Travis?"

Mike looked up from the duct tape and rope he'd been removing from their cardboard box of tricks and stared across the restaurant at Travis, whose hands were already giving off that eerie green glow. Travis had never let him see what the green glow did, but Mike had learned in the past week to associate it with bloodcurdling screams and far-off pain that he could always sense himself. Seeing that glow meant death and agony, neither of which Mike was inclined to experience first-hand.

Not after what Travis had done to Sam and Irina.

Travis tucked a pair of rubber gardening gloves into his jeans pockets and flashed Mike a wild look. "You think we can't take 'em?"

"I didn't say that," Mike said, although he might as well have. He wasn't one with the strength in the relationship. Hell, when you compared their powers, his were so meager that he was practically a hostage. He forced a joking smile and said, "I'm just not hungry right now."

"Well, you will be eventually," Travis said. He slipped a hunting knife from the sheath in his cowboy boots and twirled it in his hand like a majorette with a baton. Bringing out the knife seemed like a crazy move considering that Travis's mysterious powers more than trumped that measly blade, but Mike wasn't about to point that out. God only knew how many limbs he'd wake up with.

"Travis --"

"Shut it, Mike," he said, then looked over his shoulder with a wicked gleam in his eyes. "You could always go back to your precious greenhouse. For as long as you can."

_As if,_ Mike thought, wishing he could just have just headed back to the university's greenhouses instead of coming back to his hometown after the disaster to check on his parents. That had obviously been the dumbest move he had ever made.

Something moved in the kitchen, and Mike's gaze darted to the door, staring at it as if waiting for someone to burst through and take them both out with machine guns or something. "What the hell was that?"

Travis flashed him a wicked grin that chilled Mike to the bone and raised the hunting knife in his hand, pointing the blade towards his head. "I thought I told you not to eat the ears," he said, circling the blade around in the air near his ear. "You hear things."

Something darted past in the curtains on the other side of the restaurant, something that made the hems dance over the floor with a soft brushing sound, and both young men turned towards them. "You were saying something about hearing things?" Mike said.

A giggle echoed through the candlelit restaurant, soft and throaty, and Travis looked around with his grip tightening on the knife. "Where are you hiding, little girl?"

"Travis ..."

"Lay off, Mike, or I'll go after you next." Travis started towards the curtains on the far side of the restaurant, which rustled and moved from side to side ominously. The corners of his lips tugged upward in an awful smile as he yanked aside the curtain. "Peek-a-boo," he said.

Nothing.

There was a sharp intake of breath from behind him, and Travis turned towards the sound with a frown. "Mike?"

He spun around just in time to see Mike's large body slump to the ground, Rogue trailing her finger around his neck in a playful circle before he fell. Travis sneered down at Mike, staring at his unconscious body like dead weight he was glad to be rid of, then lifted his gaze to Rogue.

After a quick glance down at Mike, she merely smiled at Travis and said, "He's on his lunch break."

Travis didn't even flinch. He simply raised the knife and attacked.

Deftly darting to the right, Rogue knocked the blade from his hand and ran her forearm along his wrist as she pushed him away, just along enough to drain away just a little of his strength. His gloves fell from his pants and his hand glowed green as he moved to punch her, and she ducked under his arm, making sure to wait for his shirt to ride up before hitting him bare-fisted in the kidney and holding her skin against his for a fraction of a second too long.

Not long enough for it to be noticeable just long enough for him to lose a little bit of energy at a time.

"There's a lot of fight in you, princess," he hissed, grabbing at his midsection with his glowing hands.

She cocked an eyebrow and grinned. "You'd be amazed."

"Oh, don't even start trying to figure out what amazes me," he said, right before he tried to throw another punch which she immediately sidestepped before grabbing onto him again.

Rogue tightened her grip on his wrist, a wily grin crossing her face. "If you're trying to impress me, ain't workin'."

Feeling his strength drain away, Travis whipped out his leg and snapped his foot into her knee, and she barely winced as the blow nearly caved in her leg. She fell to the floor in pain, taking Travis with her before he yanked his wrist from her grasp and took a deep breath to regain his strength. "Aren't you gorgeous when you're angry?"

"I try," she said past clenched teeth as she waited for her knee to heal.

"Do your powers always work like this?"

"Always," she snapped. "Can't shut them off."

He tilted his head to the side. "I don't believe you."

Without warning, he leaned forward with a frightening smirk on his face and kissed her.

He had to be doing it to shock the hell out of her, to knock her for a loop and maybe even to tempt danger just because he was that fucking psychotic. She tried to push him off her, but his hands glowed that horrible shade of green, and she suddenly couldn't decide whether to vomit or kiss back or forget her oath to keep the Wolverine at bay in her head and just kill the son of a bitch.

She settled for shifting slightly to the left.

Travis might have thought she was playing along, thinking she'd actually be turned on or something equally ridiculous, but what she was really doing was watching the dog walk through the back of the restaurant.

The husky snarled at Travis as he pounced on his back and dug his fangs into Travis's shoulder. Travis pulled away from them both and roared from the pain, trying to shake the dog off as his hands glowed wild and bright for a brief instant. But Rogue reached out and grabbed onto his throat, and the glow flickered away in a heartbeat, fading away not long before Travis's eyes fluttered shut and his struggling ceased.

Rogue tossed him aside before she had to touch him any longer, wiping her hands on her pants as if that would get the taint of them both out of her mind. Bending at the waist, she grabbed the rubber gloves from the floor and tugged them on, then reached out to pat the dog's head. "Good dog," she said, her hand absently stroking his coat.

The husky barked and leaned his head against her leg as her fingers drifted over his thick fur.

Rogue glared down at the unconscious body, not wanting to be around when he woke up. Whatever that green glow had been, she could tell from their conversation that she didn't want to find out. Besides, while she may have absorbed more than enough of him to know what the hell he could do, the memories were disjointed and stained with the taint of serious psychotic tendencies. Everything still flashed an odd, quivering sort of green in her mind, harsh and sickening. Something told her that sanity had never been this guy's friend.

Swiping at her mouth with the back of her hand, Rogue grimaced and spat on the crazy son of a bitch lying at her feet. "I'm never going to get that taste out of my mouth," she muttered, then kicked the body for good measure.

It didn't accomplish anything, but it sure as hell made her feel better.

Five minutes later with the husky trailing along at her heels, she stalked back to the house she and Bobby had been staying at, spotting the Hummer parked outside and loaded up. Jubilee sat in the driver's seat, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel as Jane and Artie waited outside the vehicle for her to show up. All three of them perked up as she walked down the street, Artie immediately scrambling into the back seat to sit next to the infant seat, occupied by a still-sleeping Charlie.

"We all packed?"

Jane nodded and asked, "Where did they go?"

"To sleep," Rogue snapped, walking up the steps into the house.

When she entered the living room, she found Bobby standing next to the desk in the living room, the bottom drawer open as he tried to load a handgun from the box of bullets sitting on the desktop. She scowled and said, "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

Bobby frowned with concentration as he tried to jam the bullets into the gun, then picked up the box as if he'd find instructions there on how to put it together like he would for a ten-speed or a model car. "I can't just freeze someone at twenty paces, you know," he muttered. "I wish everyone would just stop assuming I can." He aimed the gun safely away from both Rogue and himself, still toying with the bullets as he tried to load the damn thing.

Frowning, Rogue walked right up to him and snatched the gun from his grasp before he could blink. She gave him a steady calm look and snapped, "Learn."

Then she deftly loaded the gun as if she'd been loading them every day of her life out of abject boredom and could do it in the depths of a vegetative coma.

"You have a weapon," she said with thinly veiled anger, "and you don't even seem to give a shit about usin' it."

Bobby's ice-blue gaze drifted over Rogue in confusion as that hint of an accent popped up behind her words and Logan's attitude. She finished loading the gun and shoved the box of bullets at him, giving him a look that made him wonder if she were even still in charge in there. "Get a little fucking creative, would you?" she grumbled, then stalked out of the house as if she weren't about to wait for him before they left.

* * *

Jubilee drove through town seemingly without purpose or any sense of direction other than 'anywhere that isn't here'. More than once, she didn't even bother with keeping her 'baby' in one piece, bumping the Hummer into parked cars and the occasional piece of debris in the road in her haste to get away.

And every once in a while, she glanced over at the others with the sort of patronizing look the rest of them never would have believed she could have pulled off if you had paid her and given her lessons.

Rogue kept one hand on the baby's tummy, rubbing in gentle circles to keep him calm, and narrowed her eyes as she stared out the back window along with Jane and Artie. "Remember what I said about not making this running away shit a habit?"

Bobby frowned distractedly from the front seat, grabbing onto the safety handle as Jubilee swerved around a garbage can lying on the yellow line. "Yeah?"

"I take it back."

Jubilee turned onto a side street without warning, gunning it past a row of deserted cars that had been haphazardly steered closer to the side of the road. Bobby glanced around the neighborhood in confusion. "Where the hell are you going?"

"I'm trying to get to the bridge."

"The bridge is that way," he said, cocking his thumb behind them.

"It's a river, for crying out loud. There's got to be bridges all over the freaking place!"

Everybody stared at her as if she'd suddenly declared her candidacy for grand poobah of the known universe. Jane made a face and said, "You're kidding, right?"

Without bothering to answer, Jubilee spun the wheel down a side street that sloped towards the river, hitting the gas as they rode downhill towards the water. As soon as they got near the water's edge, she slammed on the brakes, making everyone glad they'd strapped into their seatbelts before she'd skidded away from the house at top speeds.

Unsurprisingly, the only bridge to be seen was about a mile downriver from them through town.

And with the distinct sound of another truck starting up elsewhere, they didn't have the time to get there.

All eyes turned to Jubilee, who didn't even bother to look ashamed as she glared over at Bobby and said, "You say 'I told you so' and I swear to God no one will find the body."

Rogue glanced over her shoulder as the roar of a truck speeding through town came from behind them, growing louder with every passing second. "Great," she snapped, "now what?"

Bobby's eyes narrowed as he stared across the water's gently rippling surface with a thoughtful expression. "Do you trust me?"

All four of the others stared at him with equal parts curiosity and confusion. "What's that supposed to mean?" Jubilee asked warily.

He turned towards Rogue with a wicked gleam in his eyes. "How good of a driver are you?"

Rogue and Jubilee exchanged a worried look.

* * *

"You're out of your goddamn mind, you know that?"

Bobby hung onto the edge of the Hummer's luggage rack and pulled himself up to a standing position, looking over their pile of luggage to see Jubilee glaring at him from the other side of the vehicle. He was careful not to move too much -- his extended arm aimed purposely for the water in front of the Hummer, creating a smooth, wide ice bridge across the river's surface for Rogue to drive across.

Rogue, meanwhile, continued to stare at him through the windshield as if she were dating a mental patient while she drove as quickly as she dared across the ice bridge.

Bobby spotted the other truck pull up to the river's edge, then watched as Mike and Travis strapped into their seats with wicked grins on their faces and started across the ice after them. Bobby could barely resist a smile. He made the ice back there thick enough to hold their weight twice over for a reason. Mike and Travis might not be stupid, but they were also pissed off and injured, and chasing after them on the ice bridge was something they might be distracted enough to try.

He had a few backup plans ready in his head for what would have happened if they hadn't followed them, but thank God for the offended and impetuous.

As soon as he saw them get far enough away from the shore to make swimming back to it difficult, Bobby pulled himself up again and called out, "Just shoot already!"

Jubilee flashed him a dirty look and muttered to herself, "'Shoot,' he says. I'm going to shoot _him_ in a minute." How she managed to mutter audibly over the current ruckus was a neat trick, but that was Jubilee for you, Bobby thought with a smile. Hanging on to the roof's rack, he reached out and extended the ice bridge to the opposite shore in a solid, even length of white across the water.

At the other end of the Hummer, Jubilee balled up one of her fists and aimed for the stretch of ice right between them and the pickup, double-checking how far the other truck was from shore before summoning up a burst of electricity and discharging it in a brilliant arc. The blue-white flicker of lightning shot through the air from Jubilee's fist and struck with practiced precision, crumbling the ice directly in front of the pickup.

Without any warning, the truck skidded across the ice and directly into the river.

The shouts of the men in the truck echoed across the water as Rogue finally reached the riverbank, slamming on the brakes as soon as they were all the way on land and getting out of the driver's seat as if she'd run them over herself. They stared in silence as the truck sank into the river, falling like a stone among the shattered debris left behind from Bobby's broken ice bridge. Jane appeared to be on the verge of tears, and Artie looked around at the others with innocent confusion on his face.

Finally, long after the pickup's roof sank below the surface of the water, Jubilee took a deep shuddering breath and said, "Let's never …_ever_ do that again."

Bobby nodded solemnly on the other side of the Hummer. "Good plan."

* * *

The Hummer wove through the back woods for hours in relative silence, bumping over fallen saplings and weather-worn ruts in the road as they made sure the others wouldn't follow them anytime soon, even if they had made it out of the river in one piece. It was a slim threat, considering how long they had sat there, waiting to be sure the men wouldn't climb out of the water to follow them.

It sounded like a silly fear, but the world had become much more unpredictable, and anything was possible.

Jubilee suddenly found herself grateful she had loaded a few extra containers of gas into the back of the SUV, just in case of an emergency. They had already driven past a few gas stations, but the lights had been off in most of them, and she wasn't exactly sure she'd be able to get more gas without siphoning anytime soon.

She felt like she had been driving around for hours, the sun rising in the distance and the soft warm glow enveloping the car, but she finally pulled over down a long unpaved driveway when she spotted a huge peaked roof over the tree line. She followed the driveway for a half a mile before finally spotting the house in the center of a large, flat lawn, a sprawling house that even dwarfed the mansion in comparison.

Pulling up by the front door, Jubilee parked the Hummer and slipped out of her seat to the driveway, Rogue getting out of the other side of the car and stepping purposely towards the building. She narrowed her eyes and took a test sniff of the air as Jubilee practically salivated over the expensive sports cars she could see parked outside of the large garage not far away. Finally satisfied with the lack of scents in the air, Rogue said, "It's clear. No bodies."

"Great," Jubilee said with a perky smile. "No bodies means no funerals."

"You're just pissed you didn't get to give the eulogy at the last one," Jane said, getting out of the Hummer and climbing up to start unloading luggage from the roof.

Jubilee frowned up at her. "I give good eulogies."

"You told the lady at the last one that at least she wouldn't have to wear that ugly housecoat anymore."

"This is true," Jubilee said, gifting her with a solemn nod. "You get much nicer housecoats in Heaven."

Artie and Rogue shared an amused look as he passed her the baby and grabbed the diaper bag from the car, and Jane shook her head as she dropped one of the gym bags to the ground. "I've got dibs on the next eulogy," she said, leaping down from the side of the car with an 'oomph.' "I'm going to point out that at least they'll get to see Cubs games in Heaven."

Still unloading his and Rogue's bags from the top of the car, Bobby let out an audible sigh from the other side of the Hummer that almost could have passed for a moan. "Oh, baseball. I miss baseball."

Rogue couldn't help but let out a laugh. "Of course you miss baseball. You were still waiting for your team to win a World Series," she pointed out as she carried the baby towards the front door.

"Hey, the Sox had it coming, all right?" Bobby said defensively, picking up the luggage and following in her trail.

Artie and Jubilee both flashed Jane a dirty look. "You had to get him started on the Red Sox, didn't you?"

* * *

They walked in through the unlocked front doors, Rogue giving them a curious look before Jubilee ducked past her with Jane tugged along by one arm. All three girls froze as they took in the immense living room, the spacious dining room they could see down the hall, and the library through the double doors to their left in which shelves of books stretched for what looked like miles.

Even for someone who was more apt to prop things up with books than read them, Jubilee had to whistle as she stared in awe into the library. "I know we live in a mansion, but … whoa."

"Seriously," Jane added, nodding in agreement. Spotting a leather couch in the library that looked well-worn and comfy, she bounded over and flopped down onto the cushions, sighing with utter contentment. "Oh, the first person to try and get me off the couch gets whacked with a two-by-four."

Bobby looked over the back of the chair at her as he dropped the bags he was carrying to the floor. "Wouldn't you need to go get a two-by-four to do that?"

There was a long pause, then ...

"I stand corrected."

"You're not standing at all," Rogue pointed out. She glanced around the room with a smile, wishing she could forage through the books lining the walls for more than just this one night. The part of her that was still Erik had to resist the urge to head over to the nearest shelf and skim over the titles to see if these fine bound volumes were merely for decoration or someone's well-loved collection. Artie beat her to it, tugging a gorgeous copy of "The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe" from one of the shelves and cracking it open to show off the worn spine.

"Here," Rogue said, setting the baby down on Jubilee's lap right after she flopped down on the other end of Jane's couch, "make yourself useful and entertain the kid."

Jubilee -- who'd been in the middle of enough low, throaty moans to star in a badly filmed porno -- paused long enough to give the grinning baby a mischievous look. "Hey, Short Round, want to hear a dirty joke your aunt Kitty told me?"

Rogue immediately swept the baby back up in her arms, glaring at Jubilee before her gaze darted to the husky sitting next to the couch. "On second thought, maybe I'll let Logan baby-sit."

Everybody stopped what they were doing and gave her an odd look. "You want us to call the dog Logan?" Bobby said. His gaze darted to the dog, who made a chuffing noise and padded over to prod his nose into Bobby's open hand.

Rogue shrugged and looked down at the dog. "He protected us, didn't he?"

Well, they certainly couldn't argue that one.

She swung the baby around in her arms, eliciting a giggle, then walked out of the library a second before the others tagged along after her. Bobby wiggled his fingers in the baby's direction to make him laugh, then followed Rogue up the stairs to the second floor along with everybody else, saying, "The baby's name is Charlie, the dog's name is Logan ... next stop, we'll have to get a parrot you can name Storm."

Rogue made a face at him, then spotted a seemingly recent photo on the wall of a happy family -- a middle-aged mother and father in expensive clothes, a willowy dark-haired daughter who was about sixteen, and a beaming little boy with dark curls who reached happily for the camera. Rogue looked at the picture and blurted out, "They had a toddler," with a level of enthusiasm even she was embarrassed by. "Want to look around and see if they had any spare baby stuff we can take?"

Bobby shrugged at her side. "Yeah, sure." The diapers wouldn't fit Charlie, assuming there were any left, but they could always use the clothes, if they still had some of the kid's younger clothes in storage.

Jane and Jubilee followed close behind as Rogue and Bobby walked down the hallway, Artie bouncing from room to room behind them as if they were all filled with Christmas presents and piles of chocolate. "Wow, this place is so posh," Jane said as they walked past the open door to what looked like the master bedroom, done up in rich shades of maroon and gray. "I feel like there should be a dead butler and some dead footmen lying around here somewhere."

She started to walk past another doorway, but Jubilee's hand on her arm stopped her as she tugged Jane back to look into one of the bedrooms. "Dude, teenage girl's room."

Jubilee gave Jane a friendly tap on the arm and walked into the bedroom as if she were entering a Gap with a platinum card. She let her fingertips dance over the vibrant dark pink comforter and picked up one of the shirts still on their hangers that had been tossed onto the bed, Jane eyeing it with suspicion. "My size or yours?"

Jubilee checked the tag, then frowned as she noticed the size and saw the tutu lying on the table near the window. "Ballet dancer," she said with a sheepish grin. "Sorry."

With a shrug, Jane said, "Not a problem. I'll just raid her CD collection." Jubilee dug her way through the shirts on the bed while Jane headed over to the CD stand, Rogue and Bobby watching in amusement from the doorway. Cracking open a plain pink CD case, Jane looked at the contents and beamed. "Ooo, personal mix CDs. With decent bands, no less."

"Well, if her pictures are any indication, she's got a hell of a wardrobe," Jubilee said as she glanced at the photos tacked by the mirror. She flashed Jane a wicked grin, then turned to the closet and flung open the folding doors.

The noxious smell of rotting flesh wafted from the closet in a choking wave.

"Holy shit," Jane said, coughing as soon as the smell hit her. Behind her, Rogue covered the baby's face with her hand and turned around, looking up at Bobby and trying not to vomit.

Jubilee gagged and ran out of the room.

The girl's wide-open eyes stared out into nothing, her expression frozen in a slack mask of terror. Her skin was pale and clammy, the flesh on her feet darker with the blood that had pooled inside her body. But the worst part was that she hadn't died like the others, writhing in agony as her mind was fried from the far side of the continent. She didn't fall to the ground as she clutched her head, wailing with the pain that only got worse before her consciousness faded away.

She hung from her neck from a carefully made noose tied to the clothing bar, her neck visibly broken above her slumped shoulders.

Her tail, long and prehensile and covered in a fine coating of jet-black hair, twisted in a graceful curl where it rested on the hardwood floor where it dangled from her limp body.

* * *

The burial was as quiet and peaceful as most of them had been ... not that there had been many. You couldn't bury them all, but at the same time, you couldn't bury just one person. Only burying one person made you look around and realize the extent of the devastation, and no one needed that sort of mental trauma.

You got used to the feeling, though, enough that when you moved into a house for the night only to find a body or two lying around, you did the polite thing and buried them in their backyard. Well, polite was the nice way of putting it anymore, they had suddenly realized in the last few makeshift funerals they had put together. You dug a hole and put them in it and said very nice things about them, like you liked the way they decorated their kitchen or thought their collection of Disney memorabilia was really impressive. And the whole time, you tried not to think about the fact that what you really wanted to do was go back inside, spend a while scrubbing down the floor they had landed on, and light a few of the scented candles Jane had bagged at the last mall and tied to the luggage rack of the Hummer.

This particular funeral had been set in what passed for the family garden, a sad collection of wasted plants sent to an early grave by someone with a black thumb and the optimistic attitude to pretend the thumb was really green. After some kind words had been spoken and Jubilee had piped up to compliment the girl's taste in music, Artie took the baby inside to put him to sleep, and Jane and Jubilee headed into the house to go up to the girl's bedroom and clean as best they could, leaving Bobby and Rogue behind to finish off the burial process.

As the hole finally started to look less like a hole and more like a bump in the ground, Rogue jammed her shovel into the mound and slumped onto a nearby wooden bench, staring down at the grave in a sullen silence. "I didn't scent her," she said quietly.

Bobby looked up as he patted down the last bit of earth with his shovel, his jaw tensing as he took in the guilt in her eyes. "It's okay, Marie."

"I should have known she was there."

"You were distracted by the rest of us," Bobby said with a frown, putting the shovel aside.

Rogue shook her head. "I should have known."

Silently, Bobby approached her, slowly sitting down by her side as he tried to assess just how bad off this was making her. Her fingers gripped the edge of the bench in a tight grasp, and he was fairly sure the gloves were hiding pale skin and white knuckles. "Rogue," he said gently, "you're not Logan."

"I'm the only part of him left," she snapped, her voice cracking just enough for him to notice. "I should have been able to smell her rotting at the bottom of the driveway."

"After the chase we had before we got here? You weren't in the right frame of mind any more than the rest of us were. We should have noticed the smell just as much as you should have."

"That's bullshit and you know it."

She shot up from the bench in an instant, stalking towards the house with her fists pumping at her sides as if marching into battle. He wasn't sure what the hell she was going to do, but he didn't like the flash of anger in her brown eyes, the single-minded, angry determination he'd seen once before -- right before Logan had slammed his claws into the chest of an attacking soldier.

"Damn it, Rogue," he muttered, and chased after her before he could even think about it.

* * *

Rogue stormed into the house in an instant, oblivious to the scene she was making and the startled expressions on the faces of Jane and Jubilee as they stopped talking on the couch and watched her grab up the baby's things in an instant. A split second later, Bobby followed her through the back doors of the house, giving the other girls a cursory glance before walking over to Rogue and whispering her name as if to calm her down. It didn't work.

"We can't stay here tonight," she insisted, stuffing a toy koala bear into the baby's diaper bag so forcefully Bobby heard seams pop.

He glanced over at Jane and Jubilee and said, "We can all take shifts keeping watch."

"Do you honestly think that'll keep us safe?"

"It's the best we can do, Rogue."

"It's not good enough," she snapped. She stopped stuffing things into the diaper bag and shot to her feet, letting her anger rise to the surface to keep the tears welling in her eyes from spilling over. "There are only five of us, a baby, and a dog. We can't take chances with Charlie in the house, and we're not safe here."

"You don't know that," Bobby argued.

"We don't not know that."

"You honestly think those two guys survived that little swim in the river?"

Rogue opened her lips to snap back some clever retort, but stopped short at the thought of what he just said.

Had they survived their swim in the river? No, probably not. They had been in the middle of the river when Jubilee had broken the ice bridge to pieces. For crying out loud, they were even strapped in with their seat belts, anticipating a wild chase. The odds of them having survived were pretty damn ridiculous, considering.

They had killed someone.

Hell, they had killed two someones.

Bobby slumped against the nearest wall as every single one of them realized the implication of that question. Those men hadn't died due to the Professor's doing or their own, or some accident with a questionable level of survival without a doctor around. They had sunk to the bottom of the river and stayed there, most likely, and they did so at the hands of the people standing in that very room, currently staring around at one another helplessly as what they had done finally hit them.

"Jesus," Rogue said, running a hand through her hair in frustration. She had memories of killing people, of shooting them without guns or stabbing them without knives, but those came from Magneto and Logan. And she may not have killed them with her bare hands or done it in anything other than plain old self-defense, but she'd been involved in their deaths just the same.

Jane looked around the room at the others almost frantically, as if a part of her desperately wanted to find something good to talk about to lighten the mood. Her gaze finally rested of Rogue's anxious expression, Jane narrowing her eyes as she studied Rogue with the same quiet assessment that Jubilee recognized in an instant.

"We can't leave," Jane suddenly blurted out. "Not yet."

Rogue froze in the middle of the living room and turned to stare at her, eyes narrowing in suspicion. "Why not?"

Jane looked up at her over the arms crossed over her knees, focusing that eerily assessing gaze on Rogue in a way that unsettled her to the core. "Because of the brain damage," Jane simply said, as if that surreal answer were so blindingly obvious it weren't even worth stating out loud.

"What brain damage?" Rogue asked.

Jane seemed to ignore her question, her bright green eyes looking Rogue over like she were peeling the layers of Rogue's skin and muscle, unveiling the organs underneath for closer study. She tilted her head from side to side as if to trying to examine whatever she was looking for from all angles, her lips tugging upward in a sheepish smile as clues clicked into place in her head. "It was one of those stupid little things, you know? I'll bet it was a babysitter. She turned around for a minute to grab something and you just rolled right off the changing table."

Rogue froze. She had no idea what Jane was getting at, but something about what she was saying made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

Jubilee shot the other girl a warning look. "Jane ..."

But Jane wasn't paying attention, too lost in her own musings to stop. "And she didn't think anything of it because when she turned around, you weren't even hurt. Maybe you were even smiling."

Rogue and Bobby exchanged a confused look before Rogue said, "What the hell are you talking about?"

Jane got to her feet and continued to stare at Rogue -- not directly into her eyes but at her head, as if she could see straight through it to something mysterious and fascinating written on the wall behind it. "Later on," she said in that dreamy, distant voice, "after your parents came home, you were probably crying. I'd bet there was a little bruise on your head under your hair that they didn't even see, not even when they had to stay up late to get you to go to sleep." Jane reached back behind her own head and pointed to a spot just above the hairline. "Right here," she said.

Rogue's brow furrowed as she tensed at Jane's approach. A very skittish part of her brain screamed at her to make a run for it, to get away from the crazy girl in front of her before something horrible happened, something they'd both regret.

"Do you know what scar tissue does?" Jane took note of the worry on Rogue's face and said, "I mean, even a tiny bit of it in your brain can royally screw you up."

Understanding suddenly dawned on Jubilee's face, and she gaped openly at Rogue. "Holy crap," she said, startling the hell out of Rogue.

Rogue took a step backwards as Jane took another step towards her. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It takes a lot of concentration to fix scar tissue," Jane said with a frown, and she finally let her gaze fully connect with Rogue's. "You'll have to trust me."

That's when she grabbed onto Rogue with her bare hands.

Rogue yelped as she tried to back away, but Jane's fingers had already threaded through her dark hair, tightening in the strands as her other hand cupped the back of Rogue's head, pressing purposefully against the skin. Rogue stumbled backwards onto the couch, taking Jane with her, and Bobby shot across the room in an attempt to pull Jane off her.

Jubilee got in his way.

"Back off," he snapped, trying to duck around her.

"No, don't," she said, grabbing onto his arms to stop him. "She knows what she's doing, so just let her do it, okay?"

Bobby made to tear his arms from Jubilee's grasp, but something about the serious expression on her face stopped him. He glanced over her shoulder at Jane, whose face contorted in pain as she focused on keeping the girl beneath her from fighting her way out from under her. The veins under Jane's skin rose with haunting definition, and she winced as her fingers tightened in Rogue's hair in a desperate attempt to hold her down.

"Rogue's going to kill her doing that, damn it," Bobby yelled.

Jubilee glanced over at Jane just as the sickly pallor of Jane's skin almost abruptly faded back to normal. "I don't think so," Jubilee said quietly, loosening her grip on Bobby's arms.

Both of them relaxed right about the same time that Rogue did, all three of them shocked at the sight of Jane's hands sliding up to rest on Rogue's cheeks. She scrambled away out of habit, backing nearly off the couch and onto the floor in the process, but Jane's bare hands had been pressed against her skin long enough for the effect to be blatantly obvious.

Rogue raised her own gloved hands to her face in a daze. "What ... what did you do to me?"

Jane breathed deeply as she settled back on her heels, her rounded cheeks flushed from overexertion. Whatever she'd done, it had tired her out worse than they'd ever seen before. "I healed the scar tissue," she said.

She and Rogue stared one another for a long time, Rogue's silent, confused gratitude weighing heavily in the air between them. All of a sudden, Rogue ripped her gaze away from Jane to look at Bobby, the two of them coming to the same realizations at the same time.

Without a word to the other girls, Rogue shot up from the end of the couch, latched onto Bobby's hand and dragged him out of the living room.

Jubilee's face contorted into something between a wicked smile and a confused grimace as Rogue led Bobby up the stairs. "Uh, are they going where I think they're going?" she asked hesitantly.

* * *

If Jubilee thought they were going up to the bedroom, someone needed to give that girl a prize.

Marie dragged Bobby into the master bedroom with single-minded determination, slamming the door shut behind them and locking it so they wouldn't be interrupted. The next thing Bobby knew, she had shoved him back against the door, yanking the opera gloves from her hands .

"Marie," he said, and it was the only word he got out before she kissed him.

Oh, God. _God. _Bobby couldn't even think like this, with Marie pressed up against him and her tongue darting his lips before he can stop it and her fingers threading through his hair as she kept him from pulling away.

Because he would have, if his brain were working and that inner voice of common sense were screaming at him to back away before she killed him.

But it wasn't working, and he wasn't being screamed at.

And he wasn't dying.

It took him a long moment, with her body crushed up against his and his hands skimming over her back against his better judgment, before he abruptly realized nothing was happening. There was no painful breathtaking dizziness from Marie's powers kicking in, no lightheaded tingling that raced through his entire body and left him stumbling backward as he tried to regain his strength.

The only sensation he felt was the welcome warmth of her fingers on the back of his neck and the sweet taste of her lips staying with him far longer than it should.

She tore away from him for an instant, not backing out of his grasp as their gazes connected and she let the reality of the situation sink in. He narrowed his eyes as he stared down at her, her bare palm reaching up to stroke his cheek. She let herself watch in awe as her hand drifted over his skin with no terrifying raising of the veins, no lingering numbness as her fingertips trailed along the curve of his jaw. Bobby turned his head slightly as if daring to tempt something dangerous, his gaze fixed on her face as he kissed her open palm.

Nothing. A still, wonderful nothing.

"Holy _shit_," he said, the awed words rushing out on a ragged breath.

Marie choked out a nervous laugh as she nodded in agreement, letting her hand slide along the bare skin of his neck.

Nothing had ever felt better.

A second later, Bobby's mouth descended upon hers, devouring her with the eagerness of a starving man as his hands reached under her arms and lifted her to prop her on the nightstand. He knocked the lamp behind her to the side to make room, barely paying attention as he pulled away only briefly to tug off her shirt. His own shirt was a lost cause the moment Marie's fingers landed on the buttons, giving up on undoing the damn thing and simply ripping it open. Buttons scattered across the carpet as she tore it down the center, almost yanking it from his body before he could shrug out of it.

She undid her bra and pulled it from her body, tossing it aside as Bobby carried her to the bed. Her bare back was against the coolness of the comforter only briefly before Bobby pressed down on top of her, his chest on hers in an instant. Both of them paused at the sensation of so much of their skin touching, the eerie perfection of the moment they had almost never had suddenly striking them. Bobby's hand drifted lazily over her skin, unable to resist the urge to take his time.

If what Jane had done worked, they had all the time in the world to enjoy this.

"I love you, you know," he said quietly, looking into her eyes with a hint of trepidation.

Her smile grew as she reached up to stroke her hand over his cheek again. "I love you, too," she said, right before her smile took on a wicked glint. "Now take off your pants."

Both of them laughed at that, Bobby burying his face in her neck to keep from laughing too loud, but then laughter became kisses and kisses on the neck trailed along until his lips pressed against the curve of her breast. She gasped at the sensation of his mouth against her chest, only bringing herself back to thinking straight long enough to undo her jeans and let Bobby slip them down her legs along with her panties.

He planted another kiss on the curve of her stomach before stepping away just long enough to strip away his jeans, and when he came back to her, it was with giggling and scrambling backwards across the bed and hands drifting to places they weren't usually allowed to go. Her leg hooked around his as he kissed her again, pulling his body so close to hers that the memories of a life without touching each other fell away like dead leaves.

Bobby's hand dipped between her legs, and she hissed at the pleasure that rode over her body at his touch.

She didn't bother being hesitant or nervous or the least bit afraid of what was about what was about to happen, a stark forthrightness about the way she clutched at Bobby and let her hand slip down to grasp him that Bobby tried not to wonder about the origin of. Her soft hands caressed him with an odd sort of knowledge, as if she remembered the best parts of sex from the wrong point of view.

But Bobby couldn't bring himself to care at the moment, not when she was touching him like that, and not when she was guiding him into her without the least bit of apprehension.

Some things, you just didn't question.

* * *

Several hours later, Bobby came to alone in the bed, his arm stretched out over the empty space where Marie had been.

He jolted awake in an instant, wondering where she had gone and briefly afraid the whole thing had been some horrible, tempting fantasy. He had had dreams like that before -- Marie sneaking into his bedroom in the middle of the night, tugging off her gloves, and doing things to him that would have embarrassed the hell of John if he had ever woken up to the noises Bobby made in his sleep sometimes from the next bed over. Hell, you couldn't be a seventeen-year-old boy with an untouchable girlfriend and _not_ have dreams like that.

But then he heard the contented hum of Marie in the master bathroom's shower and smelled the faint scent of sex and sweat in the air.

He relaxed all over at that, his fingertips drifting over the indentation in the bedding that was still warm and rumpled from the gentle pressure of Marie's body. A smile tugged at his lips as he leaned against the backboard for a moment, savoring the sudden realization.

Marie had just lost her virginity.

Hell, they had both just lost their virginity, to be honest. But his could have been lost eventually, while she'd lost all hope of being this intimate with anyone a long time ago.

What he had done tonight was nothing compared to what she had done.

They had done it twice -- their first time frenzied and wild, exhausting and all over the place, their second time a while after that. Bobby had woken to the soft slide of Marie's body along his own, her tongue leaving a heated trail along his skin.

It hadn't been a Penthouse letter or romance novel cover anymore than he had thought it would be.

But that hadn't stopped it from being perfect.

Getting to his feet, Bobby walked into the bathroom, his grin widening at the sight of Marie's bare body through the pebbled glass of the sliding shower door. He pressed his hand against the door and slid it open, stepping into the shower before she could protest.

Marie flinched out of habit when he got into the shower before her, then relaxed as his arms slipped around her waist and pulled her back against his front.

"Hey," he said, planting a gentle kiss on the curve of her neck.

Marie smiled and tilted her head to the side to give him better access. "Hey, yourself," she said, wriggling against him.

He was horribly tempted to tell her she'd ruin a perfectly good moment if she kept that up, but he knew exactly why she was doing it.

Because she could.

She continued to hum to herself even as his lips kept drifting lower along the slope of her shoulder, his hand sliding upwards over her soap-slickened skin to cup her breast. He swayed along with her from side to side as she hummed, and she couldn't stop herself from grinning when she realized exactly what she was humming. Her parents gliding across the floor at her grandparent's fiftieth anniversary party, her grandpa dipping her grandma with a loud bark of laughter to "The Best Things Happen When You're Dancing."

Bobby lifted his head at the giggles that followed, his brow furrowing. "What's wrong?"

She shook her head, stifling her laughter as she let her head rest against his shoulder and tugged his hands closer with her own. She curved into him, the pale length of her back pressed against his front to the point where she lost track of where they touched.

A contented sigh escaped her lips, and she closed her eyes so that the only thing she had to focus on was the welcoming warmth of his safe, accepting skin.

"Can we just stay like this?" she said, unable to resist turning her head to tuck herself even more within his grasp, to give her just that much more skin to touch.

Her eyes still shut, she felt Bobby's smile rather than seeing it, and it was a sensation she savored.

"For as long as you want," he said softly.

The corners of her lips tugged upwards in a mischievous grin. "If we stayed like this as long as I wanted," she said, "we'd be pruney for the next forty years."

He laughed at that, and she turned around in his arms fully intending to shut him up.

Not surprisingly, she succeeded.

* * *

Rogue bounded down the stairs the next morning before everyone else, too excited to sleep. She was half-tempted to go into the spare bedrooms and wake up the others, to hug Jubilee or cradle the baby with her shirt off and him in only a diaper or go back upstairs to wake up Bobby with one of the million things she had imagined doing to him since they had started dating.

She couldn't help but giggle as she flipped on the radio for background noise. Giggle, for Christ's sake.

Oh, yeah, she was hopeless. But she had a damn good reason for being so.

She reached for a coffee cup hanging from the wall and hummed contentedly as she reached into the fridge to pour herself a cup of orange juice. The girl must have been alive long enough to think about things like spoiled milk and rotting eggs, and the fridge was blissfully free of expired food.

The static faded away as she poured the juice into the coffee cup, barely noticing until a boy's voice came over the radio.

"I'm telling you, Raven --"

Rogue dropped her coffee cup to the kitchen floor as the sudden sound of John's familiar voice filling the room startled the hell out of her.

"-- doesn't know what the hell he's doing," he said on the radio, his voice breaking in through the fuzzy crackle of static through the speakers. Orange juice spread across the floor at Rogue's feet and soaked across her soles, but she barely noticed, too busy staring at the radio as if John were on the other end trying to crawl through.

She took a few tentative steps across the linoleum towards the radio, leaving yellow-orange footprints on the kitchen floor as she listened to a distinct rustling sound on the other end of the speakers. A moment later, the odd, echoing sound of Mystique's voice flowed over the airwaves. "Feel free to tell him that," she said, the tone of her voice indicating that whatever she wanted John to tell Magneto, he'd be sure not to make it out of that meeting intact.

John made a disbelieving snort on the radio, or at least it sounded that way. "Do you think this guy can really up the signal like he said?"

Rogue narrowed her eyes at the radio as she tried to listen for identifying sounds in the background, something she could use to figure out where the hell they might have gone. There was nothing. Not like she'd have heard a train whistle or a foghorn, but old habits died hard, even if their owner died first.

"What reason does he have to lie?"

John responded to Mystique's question with a patronizing chuckle. "Well, not dying. That'd be a good enough reason for me." The other end of the radio went silent with more rustling and rattles for a long moment before John said, "Hey, is that the light for the audio?"

A second later, he cursed and the radio went silent again.

It suddenly struck Rogue, what she was doing -- standing in the kitchen in a puddle of sticky orange juice, her head tilted to the side as she stared at the radio like a fascinated, terrified animal. Her fists clenched and unclenched at her sides, and she had to concentrate to stop herself from doing it anymore, knowing full well she half-expected a set of adamantium claws to slice through her skin with every flicker of those muscles.

There was a hissed breath from behind her, and Rogue spun towards the noise.

Artie stood in the doorway, his scared gaze fixed on the radio.

The two of them shared a look as soon as Artie could bring himself to look away from the machine, his hands trembling and his spooked-rabbit expression making it look like he were about to pounce in the opposite direction at any given moment.

She was itching for a fight. He was itching to run away.

It'd be almost poetic, she thought, if it weren't so fucking frightening.

* * *

When Bobby woke up, it was with Marie's body pressed against his, her wide brown eyes staring at him as her bare hand rested on the skin of his neck. Her thumb absently stroked his jaw line as his hands slipped around her waist, an old habit he couldn't break born only a few short hours ago.

Bobby snuggled closer to her with a sleepy grin. "I could get used to this," he said.

She said nothing for a long time, simply looking into his eyes for a long time as if trying to figure out how to tell him something. "What is it?" he said, his brow furrowing as he brushed away the white locks drifting over her face.

Her jaw tensing, Marie said in a quiet voice, "We need to talk."

The way she said it, Bobby got the feeling he didn't want to know.

And as soon as she started to describe what she'd heard on the radio, his feeling was vindicated.

* * *

They had repacking the Hummer down to a science at this point, a thirty-minute reordering that involved getting rid of the garbage left behind while eating during the ride, reorganizing the stuff they were keeping, and ransacking the place they had stayed for the night for anything they might need for the rest of their trip.

Today's repacking was considerably shorter than normal. There wasn't really anything they wanted to take with them.

Meanwhile, Rogue -- in a silent display of her newfound freedom -- tossed her gloves into the branches of the tree in the front yard as the others worked on loading the Hummer. She gave the gloves a hateful glare, then looked down at her hands with a contented smile. Her powers still tingled beneath the surface, hidden and deadly, but they didn't overpower her flesh anymore, didn't creep out to grab for the baby or Bobby like a hungry predator. She couldn't even begin to think of a way to thank Jane that didn't involve massive piles of useless money with very large numbers on them.

"He could have gone there."

Rogue tore her gaze away from her hands and glared at Bobby as he shoved another gym bag onto the upper rack of the Hummer and latched it on with a bungee cord. "He wouldn't have to when all of the television studios are deserted," she pointed out.

Bobby crawled down from the side of the Hummer with a frown, and he looked as if he were trying to choose his next words very carefully, the same expression Rogue had started to recognize as the face he made when he was about to ask her about something only Logan would know. "You said yourself that that thing in the basement of the mansion --"

"-- only works with someone with a hell of a lot of telepathic abilities, and do you honestly think Magneto could just find a person like that around every corner?"

He cocked an eyebrow, a sarcastic smile crossing his face. "What, you mean now?"

Okay, he kind of had a point with that.

She walked over to him with a grin and stood on her toes to kiss him again, grabbing onto his shirt and letting the kiss get far deeper than she ever would have if she had never gone through what she had the past few years. But she'd be damned if she was going to give up touching him or anybody else ever again, even if it meant the people around her had to suffer through a few embarrassing displays of public affection.

Coming around the car as she made small talk with Jane, Jubilee spotted the two of them kissing and scowled as she noticed them both standing next to the door to the back seat. "Oh, no, you don't," she said, pushing Bobby towards the back seat and Rogue in the direction of the front passenger's seat. "One in the back seat with the rugrat and one in the front. Come on."

Rogue frowned and batted Jubilee's hand away. "What's your problem now?"

"Just because the kid's got to learn about sex sooner or later doesn't mean that you have to give him a demonstration now."

"But we weren't --" Rogue exchanged a look with Bobby before letting loose with a tired sigh. Sure, they weren't about to repeat last night in the back seat of the Hummer with everybody around, but they had been having a difficult time keeping their hands and lips away from one another for more than five minutes at a time. "All right, fine," she said, crawling into the front seat.

Jubilee nodded in triumph and gave Artie a serious look as he walked towards the back of the Hummer with Logan padding along at his heels. "Artie, watch 'em."

Flashing Jubilee a confused look, he finally just shook his head and gave her a mock salute before getting into the back of the Hummer. That girl was just _beyond_ weird sometimes.

* * *

The highway leading to Salem Center looked just like any other highway on the planet at that particular moment, with some obvious differences. Cars lined the pavement as they did everywhere else, but the cluttered mess they usually had to steer their way around had been replaced by neat rows of vehicles shoved aside to make room enough for something the size of the Hummer. The dead bodies that they had come to expect either slumped over in the seats or lying on the pavement were long gone, as if everyone had neatly parked their cars on the side of the highway and walked off in single file to die someplace out of the way.

Jubilee stopped the Hummer a few hundred feet from the exit for Salem Center, all of them staring with palpable apprehension at the strange sight before them.

"He could have cleared the roads," Bobby said, his eyes narrowing as his gaze drifted along the precisely pushed-aside row of cars.

Rogue exchanged a look with Artie, who shook his head from when he sat with the husky in back, before frowning over at Bobby. "So could Pete. You worry too much, you know that?"

Jubilee nodded in agreement, and although Bobby wanted the mental image of Peter shifting into his metallic form and shoving aside the cars to clear the way for them to be true, he also couldn't help but think of the worst as they approached home. As devastating as the end of the world might have been, waiting for the other shoe to drop had grown into a steady preoccupation in Bobby's mind since they had crossed the Missouri a week ago. Jubilee frowned at him and said, "Just because Magneto could have doesn't mean he did. Jeez, Bobby, you're just taking this pessimism thing to a whole other level, you know that?"

She hit the gas again and drove the Hummer towards the exit, but Bobby could only focus on the row of cars as they passed and mutter, "Yeah, well, you only win the bet when we know for sure."

Jubilee smiled a little and turned the Hummer towards the mansion at the bottom of the exit ramp.

Jane looked away from the back window, pausing in taking in what few sights there were to glance between Bobby and Jubilee in frank curiosity. "You still haven't said what you two are gambling for."

"If Magneto's not at the mansion," Jubilee said, cocking her thumb in Bobby's direction, "this one has to get me a pony."

Bobby scowled over at her from the passenger seat. "Very funny."

"What? You think there aren't ponies just lying around waiting to be picked up?"

"Well," he said with a sarcastic smile, "I hope you weren't expecting me to get you one of those ponies."

Jubilee beamed as she slowed the car to a stop out of habit at the next intersection, her wide grin quickly fading away when she noticed the sign painted on the side of the pizza parlor on the far corner of the intersection. All eyes turned to look at the words painted in big red letters on the light gray siding -- BOBBY JUBILEE ROGUE ARTIE MANSION SAFE WARREN HANK ARE THERE ALL STUDENTS BACK. The words took up the entire outer wall, the missing words and sloppy grammar an obvious attempt to squeeze it all in.

"They could have put it up before Magneto showed up," Bobby said, trying to ignore the mention of Warren and Hank.

Artie groaned from the back of the Hummer and threw one of the dog toys at his head.

Bobby caught it and frowned back at him, only to turn around to see Jubilee shaking her head as she stared at him. "I am so getting you a great big "Pessimist" sign we can glue to your forehead when we get home," she said.

* * *

For whatever reason, the mansion appeared to be absolutely deserted when Jubilee pulled the Hummer up to the front, parking it with a heavy sigh that sounded as if it had come up clear from the soles of her feet. She glanced around the car at the others and said, "Well, we're home."

There wasn't a single person in the car who didn't like the sound of that.

They spilled from the car like dominos, toppling out with the unsteady feet of people who'd been in a car far too long. It wasn't an exaggeration -- the minute Jubilee had done the math that morning before leaving the farmhouse they had spent the night in and figured out that they could make the mansion by mid-afternoon if they pushed it, they had all agreed to stay in the Hummer and not get out until Jubilee got their collective asses back on the Professor's land.

It had had its faults at the time, but now, as they stood staring up at the facade of the mansion, they couldn't remember a single one.

They all heard an odd noise from behind the Hummer, and all of them walked to the back of the vehicle to see Artie kneeling the ground, giving the pavement a quick peck and a pat before getting to his feet, swiping at his lips with the back of his hand, and flashing them a beaming smile.

Bobby frowned at him and said, "You know, that crack I made yesterday about kissing the ground when I get here? I wasn't serious."

His smile not slipping at all, Artie shrugged.

Jubilee glared over at Bobby. "You know, if you don't calm down, I'm going to whack you upside the head with a two-by-four."

"That won't make me less nervous," he said, glancing over at the mansion with thinly veiled suspicion.

"No," she said, raising her hands and letting a quick flash of electricity dance from her fingertips in a silent threat. "But it'll keep me from stun-gunning you to make you pass out until we find someone, so _chill_ already."

"Jubilee?"

She whirled around to see Pete standing on the front steps, staring at all of them as if they had suddenly appeared out of nowhere like a gift from the heavens. Making a strangled sound in the back of her throat, she took one look at his wide eyes and familiar, bulging muscles and did the first thing that came to mind.

She pounced.

* * *

"Jubilee?"

"Yeah?"

"Could you let go of my neck?"

"Why?"

"Is because I'm starting to have trouble breathing a good enough excuse for you?"

"Oh," Jubilee said, letting her arms slip from around Pete's neck at the first recognition that maybe she was grabbing onto him just a little bit tighter than she probably should. She let loose with a sheepish grin. "Sorry about that," she said, then glanced over his shoulder into the mansion. "Magneto's not in there, is he?"

Pete's brow furrowed as he looked down at her. "No, of course not."

A triumphant smile spread across her face, and she turned around to point an accusing finger at Bobby. "I want a black one," she said. "With a tiny little saddle."

"Great, now she's getting picky," he said, rolling his eyes as he climbed the steps to the front door. But he was grinning as he did it, and he grabbed onto Pete's hand as he said, "Hey, Pete."

Pete swept him into a quick hug, his gratitude that they were still alive written all over his face, then let go of Bobby after a manly clap on the back that made the smaller youth wince. "It took you long enough," Pete said.

Jubilee cocked an eyebrow as Jane, Artie, and Rogue climbed the steps behind her. "Do you really want any of us to make a crack about the traffic?"

Pete shook his head with an uneasy smile, then glanced over at the others just in time to see Charlie squirming contentedly in Rogue's grasp. His eyes narrowed in confusion. "Exactly how long were you guys gone again?"

"Oh, he's not theirs," Jane piped up, as if he wouldn't have already figured it out.

"Although not for a lack of trying," Jubilee muttered.

Rogue and Bobby glanced over at each other and grinned from ear to ear.

It didn't seem as if there were a more confused Pete could be, but that little comment certainly didn't help. "What?"

Unable to resist, Rogue passed the baby off to Artie and said, "Surprise." Then she grabbed Bobby's shirt and hauled him toward her, kissing him before he even saw it coming. Bobby's gaze quickly darted over to Pete before he finally threw all caution and embarrassment to the wind and just went with it, deepening the kiss as Jane and Jubilee rolled their eyes beside them.

Pete watched in stunned disbelief as they kissed long past Rogue's mutant abilities inevitably kicked in, her gloveless fingers threading through his hair to hold him close. They finally stepped away from one another after Jubilee jokingly cleared her throat and glanced at her watch, Bobby's gaze darting over to look at a dazed Pete. "You could have just told him," he said to Rogue.

"That wouldn't be half as much fun," she said with a grin, unable to resist another peck on his lips.

Pete looked between the both of them as if they had suddenly spawned five heads between them, then focused on Rogue's bare arms and short skirt. "What the hell happened to you out there?"

"That's what we'd like to know," a voice behind him said.

The newcomers turned to see Warren Worthington and Hank McCoy step out of the mansion, looking at them with suspicion and curiosity, respectively. The thing with going to Xavier's was that it was hard not to know the alumni, considering their photos were all over the place, their classes had always been small, and most of them tended to come back on a regular basis. Warren and Hank were two of the most well-known, Warren for his vast financial holdings and the white, feathered wings now hiding beneath his fancy suit, and Hank for his incredible intellect and the furry blue body usually hidden behind a more human holographic visage when he went on TV to stand up for mutant rights.

Hank was the one everybody liked. Warren was ... well, Warren was currently staring at them all as if they had come back from a road trip they hadn't informed the Professor they'd been going on before they had boosted one of the school cars and everybody's credit cards and driven off into the sunset.

Bobby frowned. After two years at the school, he had gotten far too used to that look by now.

Her eyes widening, Jane forced a smile, then leaned over to Jubilee and whispered, "Did I do something wrong? Because it feels like I did something really, really wrong."

"Dude," Jubilee said as she swallowed her gum, "I know exactly how you feel."

* * *

The first time Bobby met Hank, he had called him an overgrown Smurf, got melted marshmallows in one of his experiments while trying to make S'mores on a Bunsen burner in the lab, and ended up making up for the whole uncomfortable situation by ordering five large meat lover's pizzas and renting the _Matrix _trilogy. Anybody who could be bought with massive amounts of pepperoni and Carrie-Anne Moss in vinyl and leather was someone Bobby could always be counted on to get along with.

The first time Bobby met Warren, John set his Jaguar on fire and Bobby had to put it out.

Not surprisingly, that hadn't put Bobby on Warren's good side.

After a quick round of greetings with Pete, Kitty, and the rest of the student body, the newcomers had been led into the Professor's office by Warren and Hank, the former students quickly taking control of the situation. Now, Bobby watched from his seat by the window as Warren paced back and forth behind Hank, who had taken up residence in a large chair squeezed behind the desk. Every so often, Warren would glance over at him with a scowl as if waiting for Bobby to set fire to an incredibly expensive possession of his, seemingly forgetting that it had been Bobby who had put out the fire and John who'd been the one into vehicular arson.

Hank, meanwhile, appeared to be getting a vast amount of amusement out of Warren's occasional suspicious glances in Bobby's direction. Bobby was starting to suspect Hank enjoyed watching him squirm way too much.

Warren glared at the others -- Rogue and Jane he hadn't met before, but Artie he had seen in passing and Jubilee had once spilled her Big Gulp on a suit of his that was nearly as expensive as the Jag -- then fixed his steady, angry gaze on Bobby and declared, "I don't believe you."

Bobby shrugged. "Believe whatever you want. It doesn't change the fact that we're telling the truth."

"You really expect us to believe that the Professor did this?"

"Do you have a better explanation?" Jubilee said, flashing Warren an annoying look. She had spilled that Big Gulp by accident, but the way he had treated her since then had made her wish more than once she had done it on purpose and aimed for his lap.

"Perhaps they all caught a fatal case of twenty-four-millisecond brain flu," Hank said. He gave Warren a pointed look as he crossed his arms. "All at the exact same time."

"Not funny, Hank."

"I wasn't attempting to joke, Warren."

"I thought it was funny," Jubilee piped up.

Rogue snorted in derision as she rested one booted foot on the coffee table, eliciting a dark look from Warren. "You thought the dead mime in North Dakota was funny," she said, ignoring Warren as he walked behind her and narrowed his eyes at her heavy-soled boots making scratches in the Professor's expensive oak furniture.

Rolling her eyes, Jubilee leaned against the arm of the couch she was sitting on and snapped her gum, specifically to see what kind of a reaction she could get out of Warren. "It was a _dead mime_, Rogue," Jubilee pointed out. "All we needed was a parrot and a bar and we would have had a really great joke, okay?" Snapping her gum again, she suppressed a grin as Warren closed his eyes and let out a deep breath. Huh. She wondered how many points that was worth in the Annoy The Hell Out Of Warren Game, considering they all seemed to be playing.

"I'm really impressed that all of you have such a healthy sense of humor about this whole situation," Warren said, crossing his arms and gifting them all with an annoyed glare.

Rogue cocked an eyebrow. "Would you rather we went back to bursting into tears at the drop of a hat?"

"Don't you think we've mourned long enough?" Hank asked.

Warren glanced around the room as if every single of them had gone clinically insane in the wake of the apocalypse. "Almost everyone on the planet is dead, and it's only been a week," he pointed out.

"An excellent point," Hank said, nodding his head and leaning forward in his chair to give every person in the room a deadly serious look. "I propose that we all adjourn to our rooms, where we can all curl into fetal positions and mourn the deaths of our nearest and dearest with never-ending sobs and a vast amount of chicken soup for at least the next month and a half. All those in favor ..."

Jubilee, Rogue and Bobby nearly had their hands all the way up before Warren's thinly veiled consternation over everyone else's behavior exploded. "Damn it, Hank, I'm serious --"

"I noticed. Too serious, considering our current living conditions. You're one of the two responsible adults in our hallowed halls, and apparently you'd choose mass mental breakdowns and prolonged depression over accepting the situation as it stands and trying to make the best of it, even it means the frequent display of gallows humor." Hank managed a tight smile as he spun in his chair to face Warren. "Personally, I'd prefer not to find half of the student body strung up in their closets or lying prone in the school's bathtubs, if it's all the same to you."

Warren tensed, his blue eyes flashing with anger, and Bobby was suddenly grateful that Warren's wings weren't visible at the moment. He seriously doubted he'd be able to reconcile the sight of Warren's properly chastised yet still agitated expression with his elegant white wings without at least an amused smirk. Considering the pissed-off look on Warren's face, Bobby didn't think smirking at him right about now would do anything for his life expectancy.

"You know," Warren finally said, "'Lighten up' means the exact same thing and takes half as long to say."

"Even less time than that, in all honesty," Hank said with a smile. The tension in the room eased somewhat, and Hank pulled the paperwork on the desk towards him as he picked up a pen and gave all of the mansion's newcomers a steady, serious look. "We need to plan."

Jubilee frowned. "Plan for what?"

"Food. Water. Shelter." Hank ticked each one off on his fingers, then said, "The mansion is still in need of major repairs considering the invasion. Clothing won't be a problem. Every mall for miles can be easily ransacked for the proper supplies, and probably should before the wild animals get in to feast upon the dead."

"If they haven't already," Rogue said, making a face as she shared a look with Bobby. A mental image of the German shepherd chewing on the corpse in the mall parking lot flashed in Bobby's mind, and he couldn't restrain a grimace.

Oblivious to what Bobby was thinking, Hank kept going, scribbling something down on a piece of paper as Warren paced behind him. "It's the food we need to worry about the most, I suppose."

"Please," Jubilee said with a roll of her eyes. "It's not like the Safeway ran out of food before everybody died."

"No, but I don't think you want to eat out of cans for the rest of your life any more than the rest of us do."

Jubilee sighed and raised her eyebrows in a silent, "Okay, point to you" gesture.

"Not to mention that it's not outside the realm of possibility that a few stray deer will wander in and finish off anything they can chew through," Jane pointed out.

Rogue nodded, absently stroking the skin between the knuckles of her hand with her fingers. "If we want fresh meat around here anymore," she said, "we'll have to kill it ourselves." She said it with the casual acceptance of someone who'd done it three times before breakfast every day for her entire life and hadn't been chased by cannibals the week before, and Bobby found himself wondering just what the hell was in Logan's scattered memories.

"Oh, lovely," Jubilee said, rolling her eyes. "Just what I always wanted to do with my life. Slaughter farm animals."

Warren looked out the windows of the Professor's office to the back lawn, taking in all of the empty space with silent calculation. "We'll have to wrangle some up first. Not to mention turning this place into a farm and plowing some of the lawn to see what we can grow. That is, if we plan on having fresh fruit and vegetables ever again."

With a tired sigh, Rogue leaned her head back and let her eyes close. "I liked it better when my future involved flunking out of college and working at the Gap," she said quietly.

Hank might never have met her before, but even he managed a sad, sympathetic smile at that. "Yes, so did the rest of us." The room went painfully silent for a long moment, all of them thinking of the missed opportunities that had died a quick death in the past few weeks. College, dream jobs, something close to a normal life -- all of it gone in an instant.

A solemn voice echoed in Rogue's head, overheard words on the plane from Magneto to John that floated in the background of Logan's memories.

_You are a god among insects. Never let anyone tell you different._

So what did that make you when all of the insects were dead?

She was still trying to shake off the chill of that thought when Hank went back over the paperwork in front of him and said, "We haven't even gotten started on everybody continuing their educations --"

Bobby frowned. "You really think we're going to need educating anymore?"

"Self-defense, first aid, hunting, being able to work the power plant just in case ... yes, I believe educating may still be in order. A rather more executable education than you're used to, I'll admit, but you'll need to learn more than you think you do." He flashed the others a comforting smile, then perked up considerably and added, "Speaking of educating all of you from a medical point of view, it would perhaps be prudent if those of you with the highest academic proficiency apprenticed under me so that we might have as many students as possible with extensive medical expertise available."

"High academic proficiency?" Jubilee snorted derisively at that and got to her feet. "Well, I'm out," she said with a grateful grin as she bounded behind the chairs, then reached out and grabbed onto Jane's shoulders, giving her a friendly shake. "Although, if you're looking for people with medical expertise, have I got the chick for you."

Hank frowned before understanding dawned in his eyes.

One look at the expression on his face, and Jane gulped.

* * *

When Jane walked into the kitchen not long after the meeting, she found Rogue sitting at the table feeding the baby, making soft comforting sounds that made Charlie stare up at her past the bottle as if she were the most fascinating conversationalist he had ever met. Then again, considering the kid was only four months old and most of what Rogue was saying didn't actually consist of real words, maybe she was.

Jane cleared her throat, and Rogue glanced over with a smile.

"Hey," Jane said.

Rogue nodded a greeting as Jane slid into the chair opposite her. "How do you like it here so far?"

Jane gave herself a moment to come up with a description, then said, "It's ... crowded."

Understanding laughter bubbled up in Rogue's chest. Yeah, "crowded" was an understatement at this point, and they hadn't even been confronted with the homeless refugees of this mutant apocalypse who were bound to show up at their doorstep.

Rogue caught a flash of blue out of the corner of her eye as someone walked past the kitchen door, but she was more focused on the amusement that crossed Jane's face. "Hank's a little bit of a spazz, isn't he?" Jane asked.

"A little," Rogue said with a shrug. She propped the bottle up for the baby, then reached over and grabbed the open bottle of water on the table, taking a sip from it with a practiced ease that impressed Jane, especially from someone who had only been handling full-time baby duties for a little more than a week. "I don't know him any more than you do, but Bobby says he gets overexcited when he gets to let loose with the nerdy scientist routine."

"He said something about doing further study on my abilities," Jane said.

"That's understandable."

"He rubbed his hands together and cackled afterwards."

Rogue let loose with an amused grunt that sounded oddly out of place from her, even to Jane. "Okay, that could be a problem," she said.

She turned back to concentrate on feeding the baby, and Jane's brow furrowed as she stared at Rogue. She absently toyed with the sleeve of her sweatshirt as her gaze drifted downward, seemingly focusing on Charlie for a long moment before she blurted out, "There's something I need to tell you."

Rogue's finger, which had been stroking the baby's rounded cheek as her thumb propped up the bottle, stopped moving. "You're not going to tell me this has an expiration date, are you?" she said, trying to sound casual but unable to keep the unease from her voice.

"Not exactly," Jane said.

Rogue let loose with a brilliant grin that said that was the worst thing Jane could have told her, propped up the baby's bottle again, and took another swig from the water bottle to get rid of the dryness in her throat.

"You're pregnant."

The baby's bottle fell to the floor as Rogue sprayed water across the kitchen table. She put the water bottle down on the table, nearly upsetting it as she immediately stared at Jane and said, "You had to tell me that when I had a mouthful of water?"

Blushing, Jane said, "Oops?"

Rogue frowned at her, but the frown quickly fled from her lips as she tilted her head down, as if she'd be able to see right through the baby and her stomach muscles and catch a glimpse of whatever it was that Jane saw when she looked at her. "Pregnant?"

"It's only a few days, but yeah."

Nodding absently, Rogue shifted the baby in her arms awkwardly before finally setting him against her shoulder to be burped in a stunned silence. Pregnant? As in, _baby _pregnant? Her brain worked through everything like a typical teenage girl who hadn't seen the world fall apart around her, pointing out that she was still seventeen for the next few months and everyone would think she was trash and Bobby might not even want a baby and she already _had_ one of those, thank you very much.

But then she ran her hand over Charlie's bare head, closing her eyes at the softness of his skin, and remembered the look on Bobby's face when she had condemned his whole family to death as she had revealed Logan's memories from the dam in the hunting store at Dog Creek. Bobby wasn't any older than she was, but age didn't matter anymore, the same way that everybody else's opinions didn't. She thought about the bedtime story Bobby had told Charlie in the bookstore's darkened aisle, and savored the weight of the baby in her arms as he burped quietly and curved against her neck looking for a cuddle she could now readily return.

Jane, meanwhile, continued to stare at her as if she might have offended her. "Are you okay?"

Rogue had a million answers to that question. No, actually, I'm worried out of my mind because everybody's dead and it only took me a week of being able to touch people again to get knocked up. Oh, I'm just peachy, and I'll bet I'll be even better when I have to go tell Bobby he's going to be a daddy. You expect me to be okay after telling me I'm seventeen and pregnant after the apocalypse?

But what she heard herself say was, "Considering the past two weeks? This might be the first time I can honestly say yes to that question."

She smiled at that, realizing just how true that was, and the two of them shared a look just as Bobby appeared in the hallway just outside the kitchen. He took a step towards the kitchen as soon as he noticed Rogue sitting at the table, but stopped when Kitty came up to him, a nervous look on her face. She whispered something to him that made him stare at her in confusion, and Rogue tensed at the look on his face.

Jane glanced over at her, then back at Bobby as Kitty grabbed onto his hand and tugged him away. "What are you going to tell Bobby?"

"Whatever it is," Rogue said quietly, listening intently to Kitty talk to Bobby as she led him towards the back of the mansion, "I'm not telling him now."

* * *

Kitty led Bobby down the long hallway leading towards the back porch, and the hesitant look on her face made a cold weight settle in Bobby's chest. Whatever she was about to tell him couldn't possibly be good news, and from the reluctance in her wide-eyed gaze and the way she kept nibbling her bottom lip, Bobby was almost afraid she was about to tell him they were all going to sacrifice him to the mutant gods that night over buffalo wings and beer or something.

Hell, it wouldn't be much of a surprise after the week he'd had.

Releasing her grip on his hand, Kitty paused in the middle of the hallway, then seemed to change her mind and grabbed his hand again. She looked up at him with nervous brown eyes and said, "Bobby, we need to talk."

The tone of her voice didn't bode well. "About what?"

She glanced out the open porch doors for a long moment as if summoning the courage, watching a pair of students walk past the door as another one sat on the steps playing a Game Boy. "Okay, none of us knew how to tell you this over the phone. Pete and I had this big argument about if we should even try it, and Warren and Hank thought we should just wait until you came back, and it all just got really ... complicated."

Bobby forced a smile, wondering what would be this hard to tell him. "You're not going to tell me everybody's really alive and this whole thing was just one big _Punk'd _episode, are you?"

"Not exactly," she said. She let loose with a ragged sigh and shut her eyes. "God, how do I even do this?"

All right, now she was really starting to worry him. "Did you lose a bet?"

"I pulled the short straw, actually," she said with an uneasy roll of her shoulders. Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she looked up into his eyes, tightened her grasp on his hand, and said, "I know what happened at your house before everybody ... you know."

"Let me guess. Rogue spilled when I wasn't looking."

"It wasn't Rogue. It was somebody else."

He tensed at that. Rogue was the only other person in the mansion who knew what had happened at his house in Boston before everything had gone to hell ... the police, the shooting, John sending out raging plumes of fire that hit their targets with singular precision. Logan was dead, and John --

Bobby's breath hissed inward as he took a step away from Kitty.

She flinched as if struck, looking away from him and tucking a lock of reddish-brown hair behind her ear. "He's on the back porch," she said. "You know, if you want to ... if you just want to, I guess."

She started to walk away, nearly going straight through a wall in her need to escape. Bobby's voice stopped her halfway down the hall.

"Kitty?"

She skidded to a stop, looking hesitantly over her shoulder at him. His fists clenched at his sides as if needing something to grab onto, and she could already feel the temperature in the hallway dropping like a weighted stone, the chill forcing their breath to come out in clearly visible white plumes. He managed to drag his gaze away from his hands and look out the back door at the kid sitting on the porch steps.

"Thanks," he finally said, quietly but still audible.

Kitty nodded and ducked through the wall into the living room, ignoring the annoyed gasps of the other students hanging around discussing the new arrivals. Sometimes, a little shock and awe solidly trumped standing around feeling like a third wheel.

Especially considering what Bobby's reaction would be when he saw who was on the back porch.

* * *

When Bobby was six, he had the same nightmare every night for three weeks. It happened after he had stayed up one night and hid on the stairwell while his mom watched some old movie about a little boy who went missing. His mom looked for him even though everybody told her he was gone, and waited and waited until finally he turned up at the end, the loyal cop finding him quiet and afraid in a dirty undershirt at some old lady's house. After that was the scene with the loyal cop bringing the little boy home and a big happy reunion in the streets in New York and Bobby unable to stop crying for the rest of the night.

He had always understood why the movie scared him -- watching a movie about a kid your age who gets taken from his mommy might give any kid nightmares, even if it wasn't a horror movie -- but it had never stopped him from having the nightmare again every once in a while. In the dreams, he came home to en empty house that echoed and moaned in silence, his parents a memory and his brother a ghost.

The past week had felt like that nightmare.

Well, until now.

Bobby approached the hunched-over figure sitting on the back steps of the mansion with a genuine mingling of confusion and betrayal. He knew damn well who it was sitting before him, playing a Game Boy with single-minded intensity meant to shut out the rest of the school's inhabitants, and he couldn't decide whether to ask a million questions or beat the crap out of him or -- an even more frightening thought -- pounce on the guy and hug the life out of him.

They were all pretty viable options, if you asked Bobby. Because the kid sitting before him on the steps wasn't John.

Trying desperately to restrain himself from doing anything stupid, Bobby sank down onto the far side of the steps and looked everywhere but directly at his brother. Ronny didn't seem to be having the same problem. His gaze fixed with determination on the screen before him, thumbs pressing down on the buttons in an intricate dance as he played what sounded distinctly like Tetris.

"Hey, Ronny," Bobby said.

There was a long moment where Ronny didn't even bother to flinch, too busy eliminating another four lines of pixilated blocks, and Bobby was almost afraid he was going to ignore him completely when Ronny finally said, "Hey."

Unable to resist being sarcastic, Bobby glanced over at Ronny and said, "What, no hugs?"

"We wouldn't even have done that before all of this."

Okay, point.

Bobby couldn't help but wonder what nightmare he was trapped in this time, though. Not that he wanted Ronny dead. He didn't want anybody dead, damn it, but this wasn't something he had planned for when everybody on the planet had dropped like flies around them. "What are you doing here?" he suddenly heard himself blurt out.

Ronny stopped playing the Game Boy long enough to sigh heavily and mutter, "I didn't have anywhere else to go."

"That's not what I meant and you know it."

Bobby felt Ronny's annoyed glare dart in his direction, and his brother shot to his feet in an instant. "Look, if you want me to leave, you _were_ here first," he said, taking a step towards the mansion.

It was the only step he managed. Bobby froze his other sneaker to the step before he could move, his leg too far away to grab before he could go.

Ronny looked down at his sneaker before flashing a scowl in Bobby's direction, and Bobby shrugged in silent apology, unable to resist the sneaky little tug at the corners of his lips. Ronny shook the ice from his shoe as Bobby said, "Ronny, lay off, all right? I'm not trying to start a fight with you." Tilting his head, Bobby stared at Ronny as he made a face as if he were undergoing some sort of monstrous torture and leaned against the stone banister. "So, since when are you a mutant?"

"Since a week ago, apparently," Ronny snapped, barely able to restrain a wince when Bobby said the word 'mutant.' His gaze connected with Bobby's, tense, hesitant and just a little fearful, and he fiddled absently with the buttons on the Game Boy as he blurted out, "I'm standing in my bedroom packing so we can go stay in a hotel while the carpenters repair the house and I fall to the floor with the worst headache I've ever had in my life. Ten minutes later, I'm fine and Mom and Dad drop dead."

A flicker of something haunted and hurt and betrayed hid behind Ronny's veiled expression, and Bobby was rudely reminded of the look on the face of the little boy in the movie about the kidnapped kid, about the frown on his face when he had opened the door to the loyal cop at the end and the strange man at his door had told the boy he was taking him home to his mommy.

It took him a while, but Ronny finally choked out, "For the first two days, I thought it was my fault."

Bobby's gaze snapped to Ronny's face, but his brother wouldn't look at him. Whether it was guilt or shame keeping him from looking Bobby in the eye, Bobby didn't know. It suddenly struck Bobby that he didn't even know what the hell Ronny could do, and that even after fifteen years of knowing him and two years at Xavier's, he didn't know enough about his own brother to hazard a guess.

Looking up from the Game Boy, Ronny caught a glimpse of Bobby staring at him and shrugged uneasily. "I finally left the neighborhood and figured out it was something else. Something bigger than me." He slipped the Game Boy into the deep pocket of his jeans and said, "So I just packed up my stuff and started walking here. 'Cause I figured, if mutants survived ..."

He shrugged again and ran his fingers through his hair. Bobby had a sudden flash of his mother's voice in his mind from when they were both kids. _Watch your brother, Bobby. Hold your brother's hand crossing the street, Bobby. Don't let your brother run off, Bobby._

Bobby's hands clenched at his sides, his fingers tightening on the step he sat on with a white-knuckled grip.

The air around them abruptly chilled a few degrees, and Ronny flinched as he pushed away from the banister.

Bobby took a few deep breaths to calm himself down, waiting for the air to warm up again before saying, "Why did you call the cops if you were --"

"Because I had a bad feeling about the situation," Ronny snapped. "All right?"

Something about the way he said it made Bobby's eyes narrow in understanding. "So you're clairvoyant."

Ronny glared at him. "Does it matter?"

"Ronny, you're my brother. I want to know."

A disbelieving smile twisted Ronny's lips into an unsettling half-grimace. "Just because we're alive doesn't make us friends."

"I didn't say anything about wanting to be your friend," Bobby pointed out.

Ronny sighed and looked away, giving an absent nod at that. He glanced towards the mansion, and Bobby could have sworn he saw Kitty in the windows of the library, waving to urge Ronny on.

Sagging a little around the edges as if a little of his anger was fading, he leaned against the banister again and said, "It's not like I have visions or anything. I just ... squirm."

"Squirm?"

Ronny did just that at the amusement in Bobby's voice. "Up until last week, I didn't think it was any worse than anybody else gets. You know when something bad is about to happen, and you get antsy? That's what happens with me, except most of the time I get the urge to do stuff. Sometimes it makes me go places I wouldn't if I had half a brain, sometimes it makes me get into fights --"

"-- sometimes it makes you call the cops on your own brother."

"Exactly." Ronny took a deep shaky breath and said, "I just felt like you weren't supposed to be there. Like ... like you had to go get something."

Bobby had a sudden, terrifying mental image of Charlie still lying on that changing table in Dog Creek and Jane wandering through the burned ruins of the mall and couldn't resist a shiver as he stared at Ronny.

The two of them exchanged a look just then, hesitant and hopeful. Bobby was the first to smile, albeit a small one. "I'm glad you're alive," he said.

Something about that struck Ronny as funny, and he tried not to laugh as he said, "Yeah, me too, I guess."

"Guys?"

Bobby and Ronny glanced over at Kitty, who suddenly appeared in the doorway leading out to the porch with a guilty expression. She glanced over her shoulder at a growing commotion in the TV room, then said, "There's something you should probably see."

* * *

The three of them walked into the TV room to find the place abuzz with the steady hum of everybody's nervous whispering. Unable to see the TV, Bobby and Ronny exchanged a look behind Kitty, Bobby glancing off to the side to see Warren and Hank arguing in hushed tones as their gazes kept darting towards the television screen.

"It started five minutes ago," Kitty said. "Artie flipped on the TV to double-check channel three and there he was."

Bobby frowned. "Who?"

"John."

Ronny tensed at Bobby's side and gave his brother a wary look, hanging back as if not getting a good look at the television would make it not be true. But even now, Bobby could hear his best friend's voice coming from the TV speakers, so casual and laidback in the wake of so much tragedy that if John had been in the room, Bobby probably would have punched him in the face.

"... and look, what are you going to do? You're all alone in the world. Everybody who's not a mutant is dead." Bobby ducked between a couple of students just in time to see John shrug on the TV screen, leaning back in the anchor's chair of the deserted network newsroom and staring into the camera with a cold, hard look. "Some of us have been waiting for this day for years," he said.

_Oh, yeah_, Bobby thought as his fists clenched at his sides. _Definitely a punch to the face._

"They're using the televisions for a reason, you know."

The soft voice to his right drew Bobby's attention to Jane, who watched the television with Charlie in her arms and an oddly calm expression. She may not know who the hell John was, although he imagined the others must have filled her in before they showed up, but she obviously knew damn well what they were all witnessing.

"Yeah, I know," he said, the connections knitting together in his head. The world had crumbled around them, leaving behind the rotting remnants of civilization lying around for them to find and the last of their toys dying in its destructive wake. But most cities still had power, and those that did might still be able to get a signal. Hell, Magneto's message didn't even have to be far-reaching. It simply had to get to just enough people terrified of a world without all of the everyday electronic gadgets they'd grown used to. And then all they had to do was talk to anybody who would listen about the man who had managed to get a signal through to the others.

_We think we heard something. If something gets through, maybe everything's not over, you know?_

Bobby reached over and took the baby from Jane, trying to ignore the fear that suddenly washed over him.

Settling the baby in his arms, he frowned as John gave the camera that sneaky little smile of his. A few weeks ago, Bobby would have been either frightened or intrigued to see that smile. Now, he mostly just wanted to hit something.

"But you didn't tune to hear about me, right? You tuned in to see what in the hell that screen that's been up on your TV really means." He spun around on the anchor's chair with a playful twirl and then extended his arm to his right with a dramatic wave. "So here's your host ... Magneto."

The whispering in the TV room died away almost immediately, everyone too busy staring at the screen as the screen switched to a shot of Magneto. The helmet and uniform he'd worn to Alkali Lake were long gone, replaced with a deceptively gentle smile and the same type of gray suit someone's kindly grandfather would wear to Christmas dinner. Bobby glanced towards Rogue, who didn't tear her gaze away from the television as a muscle flickered in her jaw. If there were the option to step through the television for some quality violence, Bobby imagined Rogue would beat him to it, gloves off, powers on and fists raised as she went for Magneto's throat.

From the comforting expression on Magneto's face and the casual way he leaned towards the screen, Bobby wouldn't have blamed her at all.

"Hello, brothers and sisters," he said with all of the warmth of Mr. Rogers telling a bedtime story. "Welcome to the new world."

The corners of his lips quirked upward, and Bobby's grasp instinctively tightened on the baby.

_So this was what living in a nightmare feels like_, Bobby thought.

"Welcome," Magneto said with a smile, "to _our_ world."


End file.
